I was impressed by the veterans from the Rolling Thunder motorcycle club in their remembrance of Pearl Harbor [“Ceremony draws parallels to today’s conflicts,” Recorder, Dec. 8]. We need to “remember the history … that ensured our freedom and liberty and free elections — what we call democracy,” Jeff Neipp, the club’s president, said at the Dec. 7 ceremony in Gill.
“Democracy and totalitarianism were at war,” he added. My father said the same in his letters from Europe during World War II. What my father found most unforgivable about Germany then was that its people could not control their own government.
Which is the essential difference between democracy and totalitarianism. Democracy, ideally, allows citizens to control their own government. In authoritarian or totalitarian governments, a few people exert power over everyone else.
Motorcycles rumble like thunder, but Rolling Thunder was also the name for the U.S. program of carpet-bombing in Southeast Asia. I truly do not know how club members stand on the state of current American politics, but it seems possible that many of them see Donald Trump as a defender of democracy. I don’t.
Yet I’m encouraged that we do agree on democracy, that being able to control our own government is a good thing. Many people reasonably think dangers to our democracy are more likely to come from other countries rather than internal politics. Certainly, to remember Pearl Harbor is to remember that other nations can try to conquer by force. Like Japan, Nazi Germany wanted to conquer other countries. As Mr. Neipp pointed out, Vladimir Putin is trying to assert control over the people of Ukraine.
Particularly right now in America, however, it may be as important to remember that, especially in Germany and Italy, the ability of the people to control their own governments had been whittled away well before World War II began. As with Putin, the dictators of those countries rose by the illusion of legal, democratic means even as they suppressed dissenters with violence.
Hitler presented himself as a bulwark against outside threats, threats he mostly fabricated. In the “night of the long knives,” Hitler and a small group of supporters quietly killed “enemies of the state,” who were really his competitors for power.
Donald Trump is telling us how he intends to rule. He is suggesting concrete changes to laws to give himself more power. He wants to fill key positions with people more loyal to him than the Constitution. He has already demonstrated a willingness to violate the Constitution. More than the storming of the Capitol, the fake elector scheme was undeniably an anti-democratic attempt to override the will of voters.
Threatening violence is itself a use of violence. Setting aside the Capitol riot, when Trump points fingers at powerless people like a court clerk or specific election workers, essentially unleashing his most extreme followers on them, he is using violence. He means to intimidate not just those he names, but all those who will fear he could do the same to them.
When he makes the preposterous assertion that former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, is guilty of treason, he might as well be sharpening knives for another long night.
For anyone who truly wants to protect democracy but who also supports Donald Trump, I ask two things. First, consider that democracies more often fail from within than by conquest from outside. Second, if you support Trump, please respect him enough to believe him, as I do. What he himself says he will do in a second term is a very credible plan for taking power to himself.
I do not see how support for democracy and for Trump go together.
David Gilbert Keith has a master’s degree in history and lives in Deerfield.