“It Could Happen Here”

Dave Weissbard 01/13/02

A sermon from The Unitarian Universalist Church Rockford, Illinois

[9/11]

      In my sermon following the events of 9/11, I took an approach that fits a category which has, not surprisingly, been condemned in the popular media as “liberal self-hate.” I suggested that our nation was raped that day and that we were, therefore, no longer virgins – that our view of the world could no longer be the same.

            While in no way justifying what the terrorists did, I suggested that we needed to look at what we were doing that might have made us the targets. I have a cousin who was raped when she was walking the streets of Greenwich Village alone at 2:00 in the morning. It does not in any way lessen the wrong that was done to her to suggest that she had put herself in danger. Were she to have repeated her behavior and had the same thing happen again, one would have to question her sanity.

            I concluded:

My friends, we are not just talking idealistic morality here - as important as that is. I am talking pragmatism. The bellicose approach our leaders are taking will have a predictable outcome - violence will simply reinforce the distorted vision of America which bin Laden has been preaching to his followers. And others around the world, having seen the giant brought to its knees, may try to up the stakes. A call to 911 has been placed. This is a call to awaken. The answer to it does not lie in granting unjust demands from anyone, but in seeking greater justice for all the world’’s peoples. Only thus can we “hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope” and attain “peace for lands afar and [ours].”

            I consider that a hopeful sermon - but perhaps a naively hopeful one. People do not always learn the same things from experience.

            American politicians have taken the approach that what happened on 9/11 was that we were totally innocent victims of people who have the destruction of America as their goal. That is the consistent message from the White House. Last Sunday I read a piece from an article in the current “Foreign Affairs” in which Michael Doran, a Princeton Professor of Near Eastern Studies, suggested that the real significance of 9/11 was that it was done to manipulate us into the response we took in order to further the destruction of Western leaning governments in the Middle East. We were not the point. I see this not as in conflict with the view I expressed, as it is a sophisticated additional dimension.

[the greatest danger]

            I say all of this as a preface to focusing our attention on what I fear could be the greatest, even if unintended, impact of 9/11: the end of America as we have known it [a victory which would exceed the wildest dreams of Osama bin Laden]. I do not say this lightly. I have agonized over this for months as I have watched the developments, but there is a pattern here which we ignore at our own peril.

[It Can’t Happen Here]

            To understand my fear, let us step back more than half a century. Over Christmas I reread It Can’t Happen Here, a novel written in 1935 by Sinclair Lewis. Looking at the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain, Lewis suggested fictionally a possible scenario for America in which, in spite of, or perhaps because of, our naive assumption that “It Can’t Happen Here,” perhaps it could.

            The central character of the novel is Doremus Jessup, a son of a Universalist minister, who is a small town newspaper editor in Vermont. With Doremus, we experience the election in 1936 of a populist demagogue, Senator Berzelius Windrip as President on the Democratic ticket. His opponent was a very competent, but far more boring Republican, and FDR, appalled by what Windrup stood for, ran as a third party candidate, thus assuring the Democratic victory.

            Windrip had a 15-point program which included anti-Semitic and racist planks, a promise to cap the salaries of the rich, and to give every household $5,000. The 15^th plank was the key one:

Congress shall, immediately upon our inauguration, initiate amendments to the Constitution providing (a), that the President shall have the authority to institute and execute all necessary measures for the conduct of the government during this critical epoch; (b) that Congress shall serve only in an advisory capacity, calling to the attention of the President and his aides and Cabinet any needed legislation, but not acting upon same until authorized by the President so to act; and (c) that the Supreme Court shall immediately have removed from its jurisdiction the power to negate, by ruling them to be unconstitutional or by any other judicial action, any or all acts of the President, his duly appointed aides, or Congress.

            An allegedly grass-roots organization, the League of Forgotten Men, helps to carry Buzz Windrip into office and almost immediately the civil rights of Americans vanish. With his mandate to govern, Windrip and his cronies eliminate state and local governments. Justice is administered by kangaroo courts, concentration camps are set up for those who express dissenting views.

            Lewis wrote:

Everyone, including Doremus Jessup, had said in 1935, “If there ever is a Fascist dictatorship here, American humor and pioneer independence are so marked that it will be absolutely different from anything in Europe.”

For almost a year after Windrip came in, this seemed true. The Chief was photographed playing poker in shirt sleeves and with a derby on the back of his head, with a newspaperman, a chauffeur, and a pair of rugged steel workers . . .

All that was gone, within a year after the inauguration, and surprised scientists discovered that whips and handcuff hurt just as sorely in the clear American air as in the miasmic fogs of Prussia.

Doremus . . . began to see something like a biology of dictatorships, all dictatorships. The universal apprehension, the timorous denials of faith, the same methods of arrest – sudden pounding on the door late at night, the squad of police pushing in, the blows, the search, the obscene oaths at the frightened women, the third degree by young snipe of officials, the accompanying blows. the formal beatings. when the prisoner is forced to count the blows until he faints, the leprous beds and the sour stew, guards jokingly shooting round and round a prisoner who believes he is being executed, the waiting in solitude to know what will happen, till men go mad and hang themselves –

Thus had things gone in Germany, exactly thus in Soviet Russia, in Italy and Hungary and Poland, Spain and Cuba and Japan and China. Not very different had it been under the blessings of liberty and fraternity in the French Revolution. All dictators followed the same routine of torture, as if they had all read the same manual of sadistic etiquette. And now, in the humorous, friendly, happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twain, Doremus saw the homicidal maniacs having just as good a time as they had in central Europe.

In the book, the dictatorial president is replaced in a coup by one of his henchmen, who is in turn overthrown by one of his. The defeated Republican candidate heads an underground movement which is working to restore democracy, and Doremus Jessup is a spy for that movement.

            The book concludes with Jessup being awakened with a warning that a posse is after him:

So Doremus rode out, saluted by the meadow larks, and onward all day, to a hidden cabin in the Northern Woods where quiet men awaited news of freedom. And still Doremus goes on in the red sunrise, for a Doremus Jessup can never die.

 

            There is a sense in which the horrors Lewis paints in his portrait of a possible America are too extreme to imagine. It couldn’t happen here as easily, as smoothly as he depicts it. Part of what he was playing against, of course, was the misery of the Depression and the widespread dissatisfaction. Havig heard interviews with Pat Buchanan about his new book, he appears to be a modern equivalent of the fictional Buzz Windrip, playing on many of the same themes of racism and fear, and he was clearly not swept into office - at least last time.

[They Thought They Were Free]

            I want to add another book to our pot: the one from which I read earlier. I have always been troubled by the easy explanations we are offered about how Germany turned to the Nazis. Germany was, perhaps, the best educated, the most civilized, the most liberal nation in the world. Some people want to use the simple explanation of an insane demagogue seizing power, but that is too simple.

            Ten years after the second world war, Milton Mayer went to Germany as a visiting professor. He wanted to try to understand better what national socialism had meant to the German people. The result was his book, They Thought They Were Free, which was published in 1954.

Mayer established relationships with ten men. Nine of them:

decent, hardworking, ordinarily intelligent and honest men did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew or knows Nazism as we knew it and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it.

            The border adjustments of the Versailles treaty and the continuing hostility of its neighbors made Germany experience a high level of insecurity. The Germans perceived themselves as the kind of besieged city that Mayer described in the section we read earlier. They were under a great deal of pressure and they were ripe for someone who would relieve that pressure.

            From 1933 on, the Germans were told that they were fighting for their lives, and it didn’t take much to convince them. A philologist at the university told Mayer:

What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide the gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to a government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense or even to vote. . . .

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap, and reassured those who would otherwise have been worried about it.

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step ion disguised (perhaps even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure, or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social problems. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

            How could the German people accept the concentration and extermination camps?

Anti Nazis no less than Nazis let the rumors [of the extermination of Jews] pass - if not rejecting them, certainly not accepting them: either they were enemy propaganda or they sounded like enemy propaganda, and with one’s country fighting for its life and one’s sons and brothers dying in war, who wants to hear, still less repeat what sounds like enemy propaganda.

Who wants to investigate the reports? Who is “looking for trouble? Who will be the first to undertake (and how to undertake it?) to track down the suspicion of governmental wrongdoing under a governmental dictatorship, to occupy himself, in times of turmoil and in wartime, with evils, real or rumored, that are wholly outside his own life, outside his own circle, and above all, outside his own power? After all, if one found out . . . what then?

[America, today]

                         We are being told by the present administration that our nation is beleaguered, that there are people out there who are trying to destroy our way of life, and in order to combat them, it is necessary for us to surrender some of our civil liberties.

            Sinclair Lewis used racism and jealousy of privilege as his motivators for the election of a demagogue. I believe it takes more. It takes a patriotic frenzy constructed on fear and on feelings of superiority. That’s why I have combined Lewis novel with Mayer’s nonfictional analysis of the coming of dictatorship. The combination of those two with the current news causes me some terror.

            Look at what has happened since 9/11.

[Congressional Authority]

            The Congress of the United States voted almost without dissent to support the USA Patriot bill (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) which those voting had not even read - they had not been given time to digest its implications. It ceded to the administrative branch, decisions which the balance of powers demands be kept to the legislature. There are questions about how long the Justice Department had been preparing the bill because it seems impossible that so much could have been generated so fast – was it in the works before 9/11, waiting for the right moment to spring it?

[Executive Authority]

            The President has been given a kind of carte blanche to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons . . .” The President has been clear that this list includes any nation which does not support us 100%. He has also been clear that the government is going to do things in this war against terrorism that he will not tell the American people about today, and possibly ever.

[Judicial Authority]

            The USA Patriot Act removes the involvement of the judicial branch in the process of wiretapping and searching people’s homes. - an important check on executive power.

             Hundreds of people have been detained in secret by the government, and the administration will not say who they are or where they are being held. They have been denied contact with families or with legal counsel. The Attorney General announced that even when judges demand their release, the administration will not respond.

            The President announced that we would use military tribunals, part of the executive branch, rather than civil courts under the judicial, to try foreign terrorists apprehended overseas. We have always called such trials by other countries unacceptable. Spain has announced that it will not deport to American control, suspects it has apprehended. In other words, it is going to “harbor them” which means that the President is authorized by congress to “use all appropriate and necessary force” against Spain if he wishes.

            In one of the most blatant violations of civil rights, the Attorney General has announced that the government will listen in on conversations between suspects and their attorneys. There were already provisions for such eavesdropping if the government could prove to a judge that there was reason to do so – but again, the administration does not want to be bothered by the balance of powers.

[The Right of the People to Know]

            On October 12, the Attorney General, in a memo to federal agencies, urged that they reduce the amount of information they are providing the American people under the Freedom of Information Act. While it had been policy to release any requested information “unless it was reasonably foreseeable that disclosure would be harmful,” the Attorney General turned it around and urged information not be released unless they cannot find a basis for withholding it. He wrote: When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis or present an unwarranted risk of adverse impact on the ability of other agencies to protect other important records.” He also urged a great reduction in information available to the American people on the internet.

[Domestic Spying]

            The Attorney General has announced that there will be a resumption of government spying on religious organizations – something that was uncovered by congress and forbidden as a result of the 1975 hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee -named for Frank Church, chair of the committee). Unitarian Universalist Churches, as well as many antiwar, civil rights and black nationalist groups, had been infiltrated by government paid informers, some of whom were shown to have urged illegal acts. Ashcroft believes we must go back to those bad old days in order to combat terrorism.

            Molly Ivins has suggested that Attorney General Ashcroft is becoming “unhinged.” She writes:

For those who remember COINTELPRO, this is glorious news. Back in the day, Fearless Fibbies cleverly disguised in their wingtips and burr haircuts, used to infiltrate such dangerous groups as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Business Executives Against the War in Vietnam. This had the usual comedic fallout, along with killing a few innocent people, and was so berserk there was a standing rule on the left – anyone who proposes breaking any law was automatically assumed to be an FBI agent.

She concludes;

            In this fight for our cherished freedoms, those cherished freedoms should definitely be the first thing to go. Seig heil, y’all.

[Dissing Dissenters]

            And, the biggest threat of all has been the administration’s insistence, from the White House and the Attorney General, that those who are critical of any or all of the above acts are really “aiding the enemy.” Attorney General Ashcroft told the Senate Judiciary Committee that those who criticize him “aid terrorists for they erode our national unity . . . diminish our resolve . . . [and] give pause to our friends.”

                         In 1950, during the McCarthy era, Senator Margaret Chase Smith said:

Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism are all too frequently those who . . . ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism – the right to criticize, the right to hold unpopular beliefs, the right to protest, the right of independent thought.”

            An article on the STL:today website cites the statement of Lynn Cheney, the Vice-President’s wife, the leader of The American Council of Trustees and Alumni who listed 100 colleges in which she felt there were insufficiently patriotic responses to the 9/11 attack. Included were a statement by a Washington University professor that “The United States would have done the right thing (by not going to war); responding as a responsible member of the international community rather than as a vigilante gunslinger in the old west.” And a Stanford University professor was criticized for saying “If Osama bin Laden is confirmed to be behind the attacks, the United States should bring him before an international tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity.” Mrs. Cheney also criticizes colleges adding courses on Islam. “To say that it is more important now (to study Islam) implies that the events of Sept. 11 were our fault.”

[the refuge of scoundrels]

            When I drive around and see all the American flags and the American flag decals and the “God Bless America” signs, I am frightened. I am frightened because I believe the flag is being wrapped around one interpretation, a false interpretation, of the events of 9/11 in an attempt to distract the American people from the erosion of fundamental elements of our system. Scoundrels have always used patriotism, and I believe there is abundant evidence that it is being used in that way today by people who have little or no regard for our Constitution.

[the people]

            The problem, of course, is not in Washington in the hands of two or three. The problem is in America where there are people who are frightened and who have a loose commitment to our freedoms. A poll of Illinois voters, reported in the Register-Star last month, shows that 70% of the people would be willing to give up some of their liberties in order to fight terrorism. It is not clear which liberties or to what extent, but the disposition is there. And this is replicated throughout the United States, just as it was in Germany.

            This is not an entirely new phenomenon. From time to time, college classes have gone out with petitions calling for the elements of the Bill of Rights and have found that people considered that too radical to sign. Our fantasies of the Revolution aside, there is ample evidence that 1/3 of the people supported remaining a colony, 1/3 did not care, and only 1/3 supported creating a new nation.

            I am concerned about the possibility that before long, if the present trend continues, I could be imprisoned for preaching this sermon, just as Doremus Jessup was imprisoned for expressing his dissenting views.

            I consider myself a patriot. I love this country and would not prefer any other, but what I love most is the dream of what this country stands for, more than what it has become, and what I fear it is increasingly becoming. I have given more than passing consideration to the possibility of having eventually to move to Canada. I can envision the time when I could be arrested for delivering this sermon, just as Doremus was for his newspaper editorials. In the meantime, I have not surrendered, nor do I suggest any of us should. I will not give up without a fight.

            We need to have the courage not to turn our backs and to say what may not be popular, just like the boy in the Emporer’s New Clothes. We need to stand up for the freedoms we cherish. Jefferson cautioned that we must exercise eternal vigilance.* That means now.

[a practical step]

            In a practical sense, I was the last President of the now dormant Northern Illinois Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. In the context of other things, I found it hard to justify yet another meeting. In the context of the present moment, I hope that some of you will be wiling to join me in resurrecting this very essential organization which I believe is needed at this moment in time as much as it ever has been, because united we can do more to stave off the attacks on our liberty than we can individually.

            In the powerful words of James Weldon Johnson, We need to::

                                      Lift every voice and sing,

                                      ‘Til earth and heaven ring,

                                      Ring with the harmonies of liberty.

                                      Let our rejoicing rise

                                      High as the listening skies,

                                      Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

                                      Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us

                            Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us

                                      Facing the rising sun of our new day begun

                                      Let us march on till victory is won.

*As Bartlett indicates is commonly done, I inadvertently mixed Jefferson’s “eternal hostilty” with John Philpot Curran’s “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance which condition, if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.”