Intelligent Evil

 

The events of January 6, 2021 provided the spectacle of a mass of clue-deficient, so-called “patriots” storming the US Capitol in a traitorous attempt to prevent Congress certifying the November 2020 election victory of Joe Biden, according to a bogus and idiotic assertion that somehow that election was “stolen”.   Trump himself tried to have his cake and eat it too by tweeting law and order, respect for the police, but also reiterating the underlying premise of the protest, that the election was stolen.  By doing so he encouraged the protesters to make a clumsy and retarded attempt at a coup.  Sorry, but incompetence in attempting your crime is not a defense.

For all the rampant idiocy among Trumpers, sadly there’s also a more subtle, behind-the-scenes support by those who “should know better”.  That’s all the Trump supporters out there, not wearing MAGA hats or carrying misspelled racist signs, Confederate flags, or swastikas, who nonetheless defend Trump and criticize his opponents.  They are very intelligent, but sadly use their intelligence not to objectively evaluate which candidate is best for America, but simply to take Trump’s superiority as an irrebuttable fact and then work backwards to justify that decision. 

From January 1933 to April 1945, Europe in general and Germany in particular suffered the scourge of the National Socialists, better known as the Nazis.  While the mass of brownshirted stormtroopers may have struck many as idiots and morons, unfortunately for Germany not all Nazis were stupid.  Probably the cleverest Nazi was their propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels.

In “Life of Brian”, the People’s Front of Judea, led by Reg (John Cleese), demand, “what have the Romans ever done for us”?   The answer?  Sanitation, wine, and – it goes without saying (!) – the roads.   I was re-watching “Band of Brothers”, and there’s a scene later in the series in which two German boys look from an overpass as US troops in troop carriers travel east through Germany on the Autobahn, on both sides of the highway, while German POWs march on foot, using the grassy median, westward into camps for the duration of the war.  Then you’ve got the Blue Oyster Cult album Secret Treaties, the cover of which shows an ME262, the first widely used operational fighter jet (with BOC markings rather than the swastika).   The Stg-44 was the world’s first assault rifle.  The Nazis also gave us reel-to-reel tapes, Adidas and Puma shoes, and Hugo Boss.  Generals such as Rommel and Guderian were very good at what they did, and the Waffen SS had no shortage of capable commanders.  Again, sadly for Europe, intelligence and evil are not necessarily mutually exclusive.  We can be thankful that the world’s best nuclear physicists at the time were Jewish, and the non-Jewish German nuclear scientists took a wrong turn at the conceptual level, a dead end which prevented them from developing nuclear weapons.  See Stephen Fry’s Making History, an alternate history novel in which a different, more astute leader led Nazi Germany, hiding his anti-Semitism until after the Nazis had developed nukes and won WWII – and then wiped out Europe’s Jews. 

It’s clear to me that Trump himself and many of his minions definitely have fascist tendencies.  Fortunately for us, Trump himself is too lazy to be a dictator.  That’s too much work.  Moreover, the critical mass of public opinion in this country is sufficient to induce his more intelligent supporters to keep a low profile, rather than actively work to make him an effective dictator.  For all his dull mediocrity, “Sleepy Joe” Biden managed to persuade a majority of American voters to support him.  As I noted earlier, that itself doesn’t surprise me; what surprises me is that his margin of victory wasn’t higher.  He was less divisive than Hillary Clinton, who herself won the popular vote in 2016.   Trump himself alienated so many Republicans that prominent ones such as GWB and Colin Powell actually endorsed Biden.  When top level politicians in your own party endorse your opponent, that’s a sign you may lose the election.  Certainly it was NOT stolen. 

That being the case, however, we’re on notice that a subsequent potential dictator who is smarter and more motivated than Donald Trump has a deep and wide – though numerically minority – wellspring of support on which to build and draw should the occasion arise.   This isn’t over yet.