‘Little men acting big.’
I quote Albert Spier, the Third Reich architect, describing the men who executed the Final Solution. The Final Solution was the name of Hitler’s program to systematically murder millions of Jews.
As the Third Reich expanded its horror, the SS would march into a town and gather up all the citizens in the town square. The SS would inform the townspeople that in the morning, they would be executing all Jews in the town, children and mothers included. The SS simply didn’t possess the resources to accomplish so herculean a task by itself, so they drafted the townspeople, deputizing them to execute a genocide.
It breaks my heart to say this, but most of the townspeople volunteered to participate in the genocidal carnage, which included execution of children.
Of children!
But why? These were regular townspeople: construction workers, laborers, post office employees, merchants, milkmen, ordinary people who willingly became instruments of genocide. There were a couple of factors: Germany had been pummeled with anti-Semitic hate speech for over two hundred years, most of it spewing from the pulpits.
In America, Trump has pummeled the American consciousness with an unrelenting propaganda attack on Hispanics, America’s vermin according to the gospel of Trump. And Father Coughlin in the thirties, spewed American-grown anti-Semitic rhetoric from his radio pulpit, reaching millions, as did Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, who inserted an anti-Semitic pamphlet into the glove department of every car produced.
By the 1930s, Germans were so saturated in anti-Semitic propaganda that committing atrocities on women and children seemed righteous, patriotic. They considered Jews to be animals, parasites, and they believed they were ridding their town of this vermin.
‘Little men acting big.’
“Yet the regime would soon send them to kill, and would discover, as expected, that the ordinary Germans who composed the Order Police, equipped with little more than the cultural notions current in Germany, would easily become genocidal executioners.” Page 185, Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
“Easily”
“Genocidal”
“Executioners”
Propaganda is a powerful sword, especially when it is repeated over and over and over and over…
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it…” quote of Joseph Goebbels, Chief Propagandist for the Nazi Party
This propaganda technique employed by Hitler and all the fascist dictators continues to resonate with our current president.
“Former President Donald Trump has spent months spreading lies about the 2020 election, which he himself is now calling, “THE BIG LIE,” as he continues to claim that a massive conspiracy robbed him of a second term.” Zackery Wolf, CNN, May 19, 2021
In order for a big lie to take hold, it is enabled by ‘small men acting big.’
The SS and Hitler alone couldn’t achieve their genocidal objective. They needed the assistance of ‘little men acting big.’
I grew up in Maryland during the sixties and seventies, a state where George Wallace received fourteen percent of the presidential vote in 1968. Although the state was north of the Mason-Dixon line, it was hard-baked in racism. Being white, I saw firsthand its mechanics and its structure.
I graduated high school in 1970, and my classmates all took different paths: some went to college, or junior college. Some became mechanics, firefighters, cooks, chefs, and ministers. Some went to Vietnam, some never came back, and the ones that did often died a slow death from Agent Orange exposure, a pathology that took decades for the government to acknowledge.
And some of my classmates became cops. And the ones that became cops seemed to possess similar traits in high school: they were athletic, but not good enough to make the varsities; they were C students with poor to average tests scores, not smart enough, or rich enough to be accepted into a four year school; they weren’t bad looking, but lacked the smoothness to attract girls. They were on the periphery of popularity, often shunned, or looked down upon by the in crowd.
And a lot of them became cops. They went from being social outcasts in high school to suddenly having power, fueled by a uniform and a gun. They were no longer marginalized, their high school inadequacies no longer mattered, and they started exerting their newfound power, their newfound persona, their newfound manliness fueled by a gun and a uniform. Poured into this gumbo was the racist indoctrination injected into them by their fathers. This cocktail mix was then thrown into a community that had a history of police brutality.
A lot of those classmates who became cops worked in Prince George’s County, a county racked with racial strife in the decades that followed. Police brutality was a frequent headline there, with many of my former classmates, who were cops, embroiled in the racial strife, and the subsequent charges of police brutality.
‘Little men acting big.’
And today we have ICE, our American-born SS: ‘Little men acting big.’ You can imagine the personality type who signs up for ICE. The want ad probably read: Wanted, little men acting big. Must be willing to exert cruelty on American citizens, including women and children, some as young as six.
ICE agents are going into schools, into workplaces, arresting people who are hardworking people, some working two or three jobs to support a family. They recently arrested a man for deportation whose three sons all served in the Marines. Is this how we are treating our patriots now? They are arresting dishwashers and field workers. Farmers are in a panic, their workers afraid to show up. ICE is installing trauma in whole sections of our communities—trauma that will be passed on to generations to come.
‘Little men acting big.’
“Terrible things are happening outside… Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes… Families are torn apart; men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school and find their parents have disappeared.” Ann Frank, Diary of a Young Girl.
Sound familiar?
Little men acting big are traumatizing our communities.
You might say immigrants represent the soul of America. You might say these people build America. You might say without these people, our nation would be a cultural wasteland, a wasteland of entrepreneurship, a wasteland of science and education. Immigrants have brought color, music, dance, genius, literature, and culture into this country, which have been mixed into this incredible gumbo called America.
The strength of America lies in our history of immigrants, and it also lies with our recognition of our shared humanity.
We are being assaulted and terrorized by little men, but we have weapons: marches, protests, organizing, lawsuits, shedding light on the cruelty, and our most powerful weapon, each other. The Trump administration’s assault on Democracy is fueled by scapegoats, predominantly targeting Hispanics, a drumbeat he has been pounding since he rode down the escalator in 2015.
Racism dies without scapegoats. Trump and Miller are betting we don’t come together, that we meekly acquiesce to the latest outrage, the latest horror. They will do anything to remain in power; we can never forget that.
Lin Wutang, Chinese philosopher: “When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means the sun is about to set.”
Curt
Democracy Under Siege: Essays from the Trump Years (2017-2024)
by Curt Strickland
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DQJXKN3D/
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