“On the occasion of the great German victories, which have astonished an admiring world, we see the dawn of a new era in Europe that will carry with it a renewal with respect to politics and economics under the leadership of Germany. Denmark’s task will of necessity be grounded in actively seeking her place through mutual co-operation with Greater Germany.”
- Danish foreign minister Erik Scavenius, 1940
One assumes that a Dane reading that statement now would wince, just as any person in any country occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II would be embarrassed by evidence that fellow citizens acted so sycophantically towards an oppressive and lawless occupier. Nobody likes a Quisling, or, at least, very few people would want to be seen as an eager lickspittle to tyranny.
The historical facts say otherwise about people’s actual behavior. Despite postwar governments’ efforts to show that resistance to occupation was widespread, in Western Europe only about one to three percent of populations were active resisters (in Eastern Europe, where Nazi rule was far more savage, the percentage rose to 10-15 percent). The percentage who collaborated equaled or exceeded that of resisters in Western Europe, while the great majority simply tried to get on with their lives and find enough food and fuel to survive.
In France, particularly, a historical legacy that still causes rancor was the wartime behavior of the wealthy elite. A disproportionate number not only did not even passively resist but showed themselves eager to lick the polish off Hitler’s jackboots, if necessary.
Names now associated with consummate chic, like L'Oreal’s wealthy founder, Eugène Schueller (who already supported French fascist groups in the 1930s); the family of Louis Vuitton; and Coco Chanel, agent of the German Abwehr and reputed “horizonal collaborator,” were prominent among the accommodators. Even François Mitterrand, who became French president during the 1980s, had a collaborationist past.
Americans would doubtless prefer to think that nothing like that could happen in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. But the reactions of our own elites to the behavior of the Republican Party in general, and the Trump phenomenon in particular, have increasingly given the lie to such complacency. We have seen over the last eight years how journalists for prestige publications have assiduously normalized Donald Trump. Is it a case of rote journalistic convention that turns Trump’s demented ravings into something resembling the blandly acceptable “policy statements” of a typical gladhanding pol? Is the press merely operating in Pavlovian fashion, in the same manner they clean up grammar and usage according to the AP style manual?
Or is something else happening; is the press manifesting an unadmitted genuflection to raw power, exercised arbitrarily, out of calculated self-preservation? Or are we seeing, perhaps, a kind of masochistic admiration for the bully?
This journalistic kowtow reached a new depth with the decision of the Washington Post – the newspaper that famously brought down Richard Nixon – to withdraw a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. The commentary on this action, even from some liberal outlets, was curiously tentative: that newspaper endorsements don’t really matter, anyway, and “We can’t know for certain what went into these decisions.” On the contrary, what went into Post owner Jeff Bezos’s decision is a metaphysical certainty.
It was a calculated decision to protect his other business interests from spiteful retaliation by a potential president Trump, and it was presaged for almost a year by Bezos’ move to hire a new publisher, Will Lewis. The latter made his bones in the UK division of Rupert Murdoch’s lying machine as a Mr. Fixit, cleaning up the remnants of Murdoch’s phone-hacking scandal by deleting inconvenient emails and sowing the landscape with red herrings.
Why else would a savvy mogul like Bezos hire a person against whom UK police have now launched a preliminary investigation, except to serve as hatchet man at the Post newsroom when unpleasant decisions have to be taken? Democracy dies in darkness, indeed.
The Post scandal received plenty of attention, as the media loves nothing more than to write about itself, but a similar incident occurred at the same time that received far less attention. In August, there was a brief flap when the Trump cabal, attempting to use Arlington Cemetery for partisan purposes, filmed a campaign ad amid the gravestones. This being strictly against the rules, an Army employee intervened and was shoved to the ground by one of Trump’s goons.
The Army kept mum about the incident, and the employee, probably correctly fearing retaliation and harassment, declined to press charges. That would have buried the incident but for congressional Democrats demanding a response from the military. On Oct. 25, the same day the Post flap made headlines, the Army’s report slipped under the door: so heavily redacted as to be worthless in adding to any knowledge of the Arlington incident.
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A parallel event, almost completely unreported in the mainstream media, occurred with the Navy. The U.S. Naval Academy recently invited an author to lecture on “what happens to militaries under authoritarian rule.” Whereupon, and predictably, congressional Republicans successfully pressured the academy to rescind the invitation.
Quite apart from the fact that the academy is an accredited academic institution that theoretically should uphold freedom of thought, the U.S. Navy is a branch of the most powerful military in the world. But then, so is the Army, which cravenly accommodated Trump in a similar fashion by issuing a non-report to avoid any embarrassment to Trump.
When I worked on the Hill – only a few years ago, which now seems as remote as the Pleistocene Epoch – the military almost always got its way. I am not even implying that it was a sinister or bullying entity, but like a giant oil tanker sailing at 20 knots, it had irresistible force and momentum. That, and jobs in congressional districts. Nobody pushed the military around.
The same ought to apply to Bezos, the world’s second-richest man. The obsequiousness of politicians before the wealthy is a thing to behold. In 2008-2009, in the aftermath of the financial meltdown, and during 2010, when the Affordable Care Act was passed, I saw the power of the wealthy on display. Despite the recognition that bank CEOs, hedge fund managers, brokers, and asset managers caused the crash, they emerged unscathed: Congress obediently recapitalized them and refused to set compensation limits or attempt claw-backs. The rest of us bore the pain. Likewise, single-payer, negotiated drug prices, and price caps were instantly off the table in health care reform, thanks to the money power of the health care-industrial complex.
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Given the political hegemony enjoyed by vast corporate interests and institutional leviathans like the military, how is it that they can no longer fend off shakedowns by hack politicians? If a man with $207 billion cannot defend himself if the coming election goes a certain way, what does that mean for the rest of us non-rich proles who can’t even afford a competent lawyer, let alone the ability to deploy massive lobbying power?
By the same token, if an institution with more firepower than any entity on earth meekly submits to threats that are thus far hypothetical, how would it act if Trump were actually in power? Would its leadership drop the oath to the Constitution and swear an oath to Trump personally, as the German Army did when it swore personal allegiance to the Führer rather than the Weimar constitution? Trump has already said he wants generals like Hitler had. More to the point, would the military turn that firepower on us if ordered?
America’s privileged elites have set a terrible precedent, and in so doing, have merely encouraged even more extortionate threats. Like the French elites in World War II, they have become Quislings, establishing a tone of sycophancy and eagerness to please that unmistakably telegraphs that the rest of us are on our own. If a half-senile demagogue can knock down supposedly powerful institutions like nine-pins, then our own personal rights, backed up not by money and power but by a scrap of parchment in the hands of a corrupt court, are worthless.
The fiction writer Alan Furst, in Mission to Paris, writing of the political upper crust of France in the autumn of 1938, could have been describing America’s elite in 2024:
[It was] a gentleman’s treason. And the operatives could depend on one hard-edged principle: that those who style themselves as men of the world know there is an iron fist in every velvet glove, understand what might await them in the shadows and so, having decided to play the game, they will obey its rules.
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