If care isn't taken, past becomes prologue was all I thought about as I read Rachel Maddow's Prequel. I have talked about it briefly before during a book of the month and promised to return to discuss it. It's almost eerie to read about this within our reality in America today. If care isn't taken past becomes prologue. If someone would have told me that America's institutions could be so pushed beyond its limits, I would roll my eyes at them. I wouldn't completely dismiss them because I, of all people, should know how fragile democracy is and can be. I was always so sure America's was not as durable as Americans believed but I never realized the extent to which it was weak and vulnerable.
What Rachel Maddow's Prequel teaches is that none of this is new. In a very twisted way, it almost encourages me that we will survive this era. But then was it as rotten as it currently is? Every single branch of our government is compromised and we have ourselves to blame. When you elect someone who is a convicted felon to the highest office of the land, you must know he will infect that office and all it stands for with his rot. Maddow makes the case that because America has previously fought tenaciously against fascism, we can be sure to win contemporary iterations of this same fight. When I first started reading, somehow, it gave me faith (and Lord knows this is few and far in between nowadays). During the course of my reading this, America swore in its 47th president. Within one week of this administration, we saw a roll back in democratic principles like never before imagined: DOJ staffers that worked with Jack Smith fired, Inspector Generals fired without due course; the heard of the National Labor Relations Board, also fired; a sweeping desecration of the federal civil service; the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics was also fired because they released job numbers the president didn't like; the President fired Kennedy Center's leadership and named himself as the lead; the President deployed [and is planning to deploy more of] the National Guard to cities that voted Blue; the President is taking election advice from a former KGB agent and now ruthless dictator, Putin, to name a few. This is discounting how the wealthiest in our nations have assumed power. I say this to say I disagree with this core premise of Rachel Maddow's argument. My confidence in our institutions are terribly shaken and I fear that our institutions will not survive unscathed, if at all they survive.
"The fight here at home in the 1930s and 1940s is a story of American politics at the edge: a violent, ultra-right authoritarian movement, weirdly infatuated with foreign dictatorships, with detailed plans to overthrow the U.S. government, and even with former American military officers who stood ready to lead. Their most audacious plan called for mounting hundreds of simultaneous armed attacks on U.S. government targets..."
What Prequel shows us that even the mechanisms are the same. During the Second World War, the German government and its agents in the United States funded a propaganda machine like never before to divide Americans, knowing that what is divided can never stand. Joseph Goebbels announced at the Nazi Party Congress in 1936, "propaganda helped us to power. Propaganda kept us in power. Propaganda will help us conquer the world." They understood their enemies in ways that can never be overstated. They knew that the best way to destroy America was from within, was to orchestrate a machinery so destructive, America would have no choice but implode. Hitler said, "our strategy is to destroy the enemy from within, to conquer him through himself." And they did just that. They spared no expense when it came to infiltrating the public and their big weapon was the media. Their agents paid myriad of publications whose editors and publishers then help consolidate a mailing lists of Americans to the tune of millions of people. They also funded radio stations with the same message.
If it sounds familiar, it's because yet again for the past few years, mis/disinformation has become the biggest threat to humanity. Whether it's launching campaigns to sabotage public health during a once in a lifetime pandemic or it is flooding our algorithms so that a person can further spiral in their self-perpetuating echo chamber of confirmation bias loop or infiltrating money in politics so that candidates who erode freedom, democracy, and unity can win...it is a fight for humanity's survival. I am not exaggerating. They know that once we are divided we will never stand. For as long as we refuse to see how much more we the masses have in common than the oligarchs, for as long as we refuse to hold the powers that be accountable, for as long as we appeal to the lowest common denominator among as, for as long as we are blinded by hate and bigotry, the machinery of tyranny, or warmongering, of cruelty will win.
The insidiousness, the poison of racism and oppression and injustice defies time. When Theodore Roosevelt became president, he apparently was super passionate about one thing: eradicating "race suicide." What is race suicide, you ask? He was angry that White Americans were mixing their genes too freely with other folks, inviting this "race suicide." He wanted white women to have more 100 percent pure white babies. "Warfare of the cradle is fundamentally infinitely more important than any other question in this country," Teddy Roosevelt said. Maddow argues Teddy was not alone in this. Abraham Lincoln also expressed hopes that all people of "African descent living in the United States would one day be shipped overseas." Teddy held the opinion that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Woodrow Wilson in 1913, resegregated the federal workforce by law, and purged Black Americans from the best and best-paying government jobs. Calvin Coolidge in 1924 signed radical restrictions on immigration because such restrictions where the first step in walling off white America from the "vicious, the weak of the body, the shiftless or the improvident whom you could identify by nationality and skin color. These are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons."
That is the foundation of this country. That is the premise that so many Americans idolize. That is the America they want to go back to. The greatness they see when they envision America.
It is no longer enough to just scroll through tweets or absentmindedly. We must equip ourselves with knowledge. We must go seeking history to understand the foundations of evil in the world we live in. So for my Nigerian brothers and sisters who are consumed with people's sexuality and want to see a world where that is legislated. Here is what I will never stop reminding people: hate is indiscriminate. You can't parcel it. It's not a la carte. If someone hates gay people, they almost always hate us Black folks too. And women. And immigrant. It is a package deal. Hate is also senseless. Because how do you explain that the U.S. Supreme Court once held that Puerto Ricans were "foreign to the United States in a domestic sense." Does that make any sense?
"One big appeal of fascism, if nothing else, was its unapologetic embrace of cruelty. Cruelty toward others, coupled with hypersensitivity towards any slide to oneself."
When you read Maddow's book, what stands out are the Americans who decided BY ALL MEANS possible to stop fascism. There are people fighting now too. Just as in the 1940s, there are smart, courageous, tenacious, self-sacrificing Americans fighting hard to stop fascism, cruelty, and hate in its tracks. Will you join them? In 2023, Freedom House reported that almost 2/3 of the word was governed under some form of authoritarian rule. It would be naive to think we are exempt from this disease. Rachel Maddow's book is a must read and yet I fear we are too late. She sounds an alarm too many people have tuned out. Why do we not care who runs our societies? Why do we allow a few powerful wealthy fascists have all the control, while we fold our arms and shrug? Why?
I wish I had clear cut answers for you. I wish I could lay it down so easily. I can't. I know we can fight and we can resist. I know we must not give up. I know it's a long, arduous journey. I know we will survive. I just don't know the simple, easy answer. I don't know why evil seems to triumph over good. I don't know why it seems like the wicked enjoy a life of ease. But God sees all.
At the end of Prequel, Rachel Maddow gives a quick account of the aftermath of the most disgusting fascists and bigots who spent their time fueling hate and propaganda to divide Americans and who were dogged in their commitment to fascism in America. One was jailed and when he got out his wife had left him and sold all his earthly possessions (donating the proceeds to Jewish and Catholic refugee groups) and when he died, despite his professional accomplishment his obituary merely referred to him as a "white supremacist and antisemite." It got even more pathetic as she relayed their accounts. God cannot be mocked. What you sow, you will reap.
Love,
I
