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A Message to the Undecided Voter: Don't Elect the Dictator
This is the moment we all get on the right side of history. If we choose the wrong path, it will not end well for people, this nation, or this world.
Nov 04, 2024
When I learned, as an adolescent, that Hitler had been an elected head of state, I was incredulous.
I don't know how I learned this. Not from my parents and not from the nuns who taught me for 12 years of school. I was utterly ignorant about pre- and post-World War II Germany. My father had served in the Pacific. In my neighborhood, as a child, our teams were divided, for far-ranging games of war, between the Americans and the Nazis. Having never heard the word before, let alone seen it written, I imagined the bad guys as K-N-O-T-S-I-E-S, pathetic little balls of snarled string.
In college, with better information than my hometown rah-rah newspaper's, I became an anti-war activist. Ever since the Vietnam War era, I've been challenged with the question, "Would you oppose all wars/ What would you have done about Hitler?" To which my answer became, "Hitler was elected. There were plenty of chances to stop Hitler before six million Jews died and he started that war."
And now I wonder where those chances were, and what I would have done. Because I have learned how Hitler was loved by his people. And I have seen something like it in my country now.
Germany's infatuation with Hitler ended badly for everyone.
Hitler was seen by many Germans as a savior. They credited him with restoring the German economy after the Great Depression, and restoring German pride—and its army—after their humiliating defeat in World War I. They loved how he wanted to preserve the purity of German language and culture, and Christian religion. They loved how he hated the people they hated—an elite that they felt looked down on them. Professors, doctors, lawyers and businessmen were suspect. Many of them were Jewish, and Hitler easily convinced his supporters that Jews were "poisoning" German blood.
The oaths of the military and civil service were changed from loyalty sworn to Germany to loyalty sworn to Hitler. Here is the oath of Hitler Youth:
"In the presence of this blood banner which represents our Fuhrer, I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give up my life for him, so help me God."
Alfons Heck, a former member, wrote of how it caused an eruption "into a frenzy of nationalistic pride that bordered on hysteria... we shouted at the top of our lungs, with tears streaming down our faces: Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil' From that moment on, I belonged to Adolf Hitler body and soul."
People gathered outside Hitler's residence to catch a glimpse of him, and women shouted their love and that they wanted to have babies with him. He got thousands of love letters a year. German psychoanalyst and author Alice Miller spent her professional lifetime analyzing "good Germans" and writing about it. They were consumed with guilt, after the war, for having allowed the Holocaust, and shame, for having loved Hitler. The trauma was inherited by the next generation, and she wrote of how that affected Germany too.
The German dictator's rule ended in suicide, in a bunker, where the generals our current presidential candidate says he wished he had told their leader the truth they'd been afraid to until it was unavoidable: he had lost the war. Germany's infatuation with Hitler ended badly for everyone.
Our would-be dictator starred on American television for 14 years, longer than any American presidency lasts. As a television actress, I know the power of the medium, and the characters we play. Every week for 14 years, people saw Donald Trump in their living rooms, impeccably dressed and made up, judging others with authoritative discernment, separating the weak from the strong, the wheat from the chaff, in elimination rounds that climaxed the drama every week: You're Fired. He was sometimes tender, being cruel only to be kind, and the contestants hopeful for his approval, bristling with Hollywood clothes and make-up, accepted his word as final.
He was never that man. The character wasn't real. And today's version is far from it. The TV star controlled his performance. The candidate can't.
He assumes the mantle of peacemaker, criticizing war. He claims to have opposed the War in Iraq. So did I. He distrusts the "Deep state"—I have done so for years, doubting everything from our rationale for the war in Vietnam to the official story of the Kennedy assassination and the denial of involvement in Central America. But for me, the stance involves study and practice of nonviolence. Donald Trump, even as he preposterously lies that he's something like Martin Luther King, foments violence. Peace comes from within. A man whose family, businesses, administration, and relationships were—and remain—in violent turmoil cannot bring world peace. He knows only how to deal with problems by making them go away, as he did on TV: elimination rounds. Certain groups, departments, organizations, individuals—and, maybe, countries—must be eliminated for peace to come. You're Fired! It seems so simple: final solutions like you've never seen before!
In Hitler's day, a lawyer with the tragically ironic last name of Frank wrote, "I can say that the foundation of the National Socialist State is the National Socialist legal system[...] since we know how holy the foundations of our legal system are to the Führer, we and our people’s comrades can be sure: your life and your existence are secure in this National Socialist state of order, freedom, and justice."
Albert Speer, author of Inside the Third Reich, wrote that, as German morale dropped, Hitler's crowds had to be organized. Spontaneity no longer drew them. Hitler also became "angry and impatient...when, as still occasionally happened, a crowd began clamoring for him to appear." This echoes ominously with the current Trump rallies, which are shrinking, where the crowd sometimes waits for hours before he appears—and then he comes bearing insults.
This is the moment, for those of you who are still undecided, when we can stop the dictator. Don't elect him.
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100+ Global Lawmakers Urge Biden to Reject New LNG Exports
"Every dollar invested in unnecessary, harmful, and expensive LNG infrastructure costs us double—first, by our failure to invest instead in secure, abundant, and cheap renewable energies, and second, by locking in higher greenhouse gas emissions."
Sep 23, 2024
With Climate Week underway in New York City, 106 lawmakers from the United States and around the world on Monday urged the Biden administration to reject new liquefied natural gas export permits, stressing that they "are not in the U.S. public interest or necessary for the national or energy security of our allies."
Rejecting new permits, they wrote, "will help protect communities from the environmental harm that fossil gas causes; promote global energy security and encourage investment and trade in clean energy technologies; and help our nations satisfy both national and global climate commitments, including those made at the 2023 U.N. climate change conference COP28 in Dubai."
The letter to U.S. President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was led by Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Congresswoman Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.), and Lisa Badum, a Greens member of Germany's Bundestag. Along with other American and German lawmakers, it's signed by members of the European Parliament and legislatures in over a dozen other countries.
"Curtailing U.S. LNG export activity will send a strong global signal in favor of new investments in renewable energy."
They explained that in January, the Biden administration paused new export authorizations for liquefied natural gas (LNG) to countries that don't have free trade agreements with the United States, and although a recent federal court ruling blocked the policy, "that misguided decision does not force any immediate export project approvals, prevent the Department of Energy (DOE) from updating its environmental and economic analyses, or impact the factors that DOE already considers in its application review process."
"Far from being a clean 'bridge' fuel, LNG causes significant environmental harm," the lawmakers declared, highlighting the impacts of gas on not only the global climate but also the health of people exposed to nearby hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, operations and infrastructure such as processing plants, import facilities, export terminals, and pipelines.
"In addition to the environmental and health benefits, limiting U.S. LNG exports will actually support global energy security, not jeopardize it," they wrote. "Curtailing U.S. LNG export activity will send a strong global signal in favor of new investments in renewable energy, discouraging overinvestment in a volatile and high-priced fossil fuel."
The letter notes that the United States is "the world's largest exporter of LNG" and warns that such exports "affect the world's regions in various ways, but uniformly, they are negative," with sections on Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe.
"Every dollar invested in unnecessary, harmful, and expensive LNG infrastructure costs us double—first, by our failure to invest instead in secure, abundant, and cheap renewable energies, and second, by locking in higher greenhouse gas emissions, with attendant future climate damage," the letter emphasizes. "Continued reliance on LNG means more harm to frontline communities and the environment from extracting, transporting, and shipping fossil gas around the world."
The lawmakers' letter follows one that a coalition of more than 250 climate, environmental, and frontline groups sent to Biden and Granholm earlier this month—during the warmest summer on record and what is on track to be the hottest year on record.
"We are on the verge of seeing global average temperatures exceed 1.5°C warming above preindustrial temperatures, failing the internationally agreed upon goal of the Paris agreement and crossing the threshold upon which ever more catastrophic effects of climate change begin," the green groups wrote. "The only way world leaders can avoid this moral and political failure is to work together to end fossil fuel production."
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'Back With a Bang': Climate Marches Kick Off Worldwide as Global South Seeks Reparations
"It is unconscionable that Global North governments have continuously rejected their responsibility to deliver adequate climate finance for the Global South."
Sep 20, 2024
Climate protesters across the world hit the streets on Friday to kick off this year's Global Climate Strike ahead of the opening of high-level United Nations General Assembly meetings next week, where climate finance for the Global South is on the agenda.
Protests for climate justice were planned across 50 countries, with Germany alone seeing more than 100 rallies that together drew some 75,000 people. The protests were spearheaded by the youth-led group Fridays for Future (FFF), started by Greta Thunberg in 2018. The New York chapter of the group marched across the Brooklyn Bridge Friday afternoon aiming to "tear down the pillars of the fossil fuel industry."
One of the main climate items on the international agenda this year regards financing for Global South countries that are disproportionately impacted by climate breakdown. The Climate Action Network International on Friday called for Global North countries—which are responsible for the vast majority of historical emissions—to pay $5 trillion per year to Global South countries in climate reparations.
"It is unconscionable that Global North governments have continuously rejected their responsibility to deliver adequate climate finance for the Global South," Lidy Nacpil, the Philippines-based coordinator of the Asian Peoples Movement on Debt and Development, said in a statement.
"If developed nations are serious about solving the problem of climate change, as they claim to be, they should agree to a climate finance target that covers the costs of mitigation, adaptation, just transition, and loss and damage," she added. "The Global South is owed trillions—not billions."
Today in Berlin! This is big. It’s not easy being a climate activist these days yet hope is all around. #climatestrike #nowforfuture pic.twitter.com/A9jze0yts7
— Luisa Neubauer (@Luisamneubauer) September 20, 2024
The UNGA meetings will set the stage for negotiations at the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in November.
Advocates criticized rich countries for their unwillingness to provide meaningful levels of finance to the Global South following preliminary talks in Bonn, Germany in June.
A study published in Nature last year found that even if all countries decarbonize by 2050, Global North countries would by that time collectively owe Global South countries $192 trillion in climate reparations. This analysis is the basis for the $5 trillion annual payout sought by campaigners.
The New York marchers on Friday chanted climate protest favorites such as "What do we want? Climate justice. When do we want it? Now" and "The people, united, will never be defeated" as they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. They carried banners with messages such as "Tear Down Fossil Fuels" and "We Strike for the Future."
The most specific demand issued by the New York protesters on Friday was for Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, to sign the Climate Change Superfund Act, which would require polluting companies in the state to pay into a fund that could be used for extreme weather resiliency and preparation projects. The state Legislature has already passed the bill, and it awaits only the governor's signature. Democrats have also proposed a similar measure at the federal level.
There's some diversity in the political makeup of the global FFF protests, which, even just in New York, include people from a wide array of organizations. The German chapter has distanced itself from comments Thunberg made about Israel's war on Gaza, which she called a genocide. She was arrested at a pro-Palestine rally in Stockholm earlier this month.
FFF Germany did take a swipe at the far-right, which has been ascendant in the country in recent years, running on an anti-immigrant platform, and the national government, led by the center-left Social Democratic Party.
"The climate crisis is the greatest challenge of our time, not right-wing debates about migration," the group wrote on social media on Friday. "If the climate targets were a border, the government would have closed it long ago. We remain loud for climate protection!"
FFF and other climate activist groups have not been able to sustain the numbers they reached in 2019, when coordinated strikes across the world reached record numbers.
Though Friday's actions were smaller, they gave hope to movement veterans. Writer and climate organizer Bill McKibben, remarking on the large number of protesters in Germany, wrote on social media that school strikes were "back with a bang."
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