In Fate’s Crib

Are we witnessing, in some American form, fashion and version, Germany in 1933/1934, which culminated on June 30, 1934 in a chain of events called “the Night of the Long Knives” — a night that ended any semblance of law and legal rule in Germany — witnessing it in very, very slow motion.

Is all that stands between us and the end of America our fundamental belief in the law, with the special prosecutor as the final, most essentially American expression of us as a nation of law-abiding people?

And too is the American military’s oath of allegiance and duty to serve the United States so vital an ingredient in our nation of laws that it serves now to separate us from an autocracy that would have the potential to be one of the worst in history? Among the worst because an American autocrat would in this moment command  the greatest military and economic power in history.

Are we headed toward becoming that, to having that done to us as no one has been able to do in the 242 years since the first set of founders’ made their Declaration or 231 years since the second set of founders signed for us as “We the People?”

I think we are; not that we are fated to but that possibly we could very well be on the way to losing our Republic.  If we do, then the flag for which it stands will be but a tattered remnant of one of history’s grandest experiments.

Still, as they say, all good things come to an end. So may America. I don’t think it will but the very fact that any sensible person knows it is at risk is, well, as they say, chilling.

Athens is gone.

The Roman Republic  gave itself over to an empire that consumed itself.

The British Empire is no more, its glory overtaken by change upon and over the waves it ruled.

Napoleon, we know, as the lyric goes in “Hamilton”, could “…never be satisfied”.

Are you old enough to remember the Soviet Union?  No one wants to remember it except Vladimir Putin and his cronies. But it happened, it corrupted  and then it ended.

It sent here, to the United States, probably over a million people who, having grown up in an entirely corrupt, corrupted and corrupting society, brought a corruption with them that had become ingrained in their souls, in their social, economic and political blood stream: Witness Michael Cohen, who comes from them, and his partner, one of those Russian emigrates, who is pleading guilty to 125 years worth of crimes.

Oh yes, be sure that his plea will pry loose cooperation and a similar plea from Cohen a clearly stupid, vain, fool; that is virtually certain and should make crystal clear that  when Cohen spills his guts to save himself from dying in prison, Donald J. Trump will be exposed as a gangster.

Does the name Al Capone strike a bell, the gangster of gangsters, at least in his time? Know what the feds got him on in the end in 1940? Not murder, not the St. Valentines Day Massacre, not rum running, not extortion, not illegal gambling or prostitution, all of which he was guilty. None of those.

They got him on tax evasion. Is there any wonder, can there be any wonder, really,  that we have not seen Trump’s tax returns?

But let’s turn away this digression to that sort of thing and come full circle to the mounting evidence of a metastatic autocracy here and to the crystal clear fact that all that separates us from our own “Night of the Long Knives” is a U.S. military that takes its oath of service seriously.

Remove it from the field and then imagine  Trump rallies becoming Trump hordes of high-stepping, high-booted thugs brandishing clubs, whips chains and guns at the service of a gangster autocrat.

This in turn raises a related existential question that troubles history. Well, a question of many parts but concerning one inescapable final question (one hates to use the word final in any reference to the man H., still it is as you will see the final question in its difficult moral equation).

Had you known, in 1889 — had you known who and what the infant Adolph would become; had known the damage, destruction, misery, death — all of it — that he would cause, would order would inflict and accomplish.

Had you known all that, been able to see it project in your mind in the few seconds of the moment of his birth; had you had the chance, knowing all of that, seeing it all in the crystallization of a few seconds, would you have strangled him in his crib?

I repeat, would you have strangled him in his crib? Would it have been morally right or wrong to do it, knowing that if you did not then everything you had seen flash by in the instant of his birth would happen, inexorably would be fated to happen?

Would you have done that? Does the question apply in any like circumstance in your contemporary experience? Can it be asked but once about only that one worst birth in all of the history of humankind? Or…