A mislabeled Leader's 'small' Dictatorial Heart: Days of Infamy in the United States
Query: Does the 'dear leader' lack empathy (the problem of the 'small heart' within the cranial networks) or is there a deeper problem??
A. Personal Reflections (1940-1974, mostly)
While writing a college freshman essay (about the day I was born) I discovered that the Battle of Dunkirk was in full swing during the late spring of 1940. Several of my much older cousins on both my father's and mother's side fought in World War II and — while War War II had ended by the time I entered elementary school — the events of World War II formed part of the cultural backdrop of my early years, my adolescence, and my early manhood. In 1959 a college professor provided me with my first introduction to what we now refer to as the 'Holocaust'. During the next few years while involved as a minor actor within the political and cultural Movement for Peace and Justice within the United States I had time to develop my own perspective about the German holocaust and its origins (as well as perspectives about such issues as U.S. slavery, the Civil War, and its legacy). I make no claim about the importance of my own views on German fascism. I simply state that I had time over ~3 decades to develop those views. For what it is worth, it strikes me that the rise of German Nazi fascism (spearheaded, as it were, by Adolf Hitler) was — among other things — (1) the culmination of some very specific failures rooted in the relationship between the German (Military) State and the German Church as well as (2) a consequence of festering European-wide anti-Semiticism that had roots that that reached back to the emergence of very early Christian churches. My own studies have been especially influenced (1) by the work of the martyred German pastor (Dietrich Bonhoeffer) murdered in 1945 just before the final downfall of the Nazi Regime and (2) by Rolf Hochhuth's seminal play, The Deputy, which considers the complicity of European religion, populations, and religious leaders [specifically, Pope] with the Nazi-lead genocide. Today, other persons — many of them better informed than I — have both similar and very different views, but my primary point is that these views have normally been formed over several years or several decades.
However, while one can certainly argue that various persons have 'seen' the coming and/or development of U.S. fascism, I must confess that the depth of foolhardy hatred-and-fear captured by one Donald J. Trump has surprised me in more ways than I had suspected possible. I offer these sentiments simply as a contribution to our understanding of the darker angels now loosened upon the U.S. people and their institutions while we rub our eyes as deeds that will live in infamy transpire both in broad daylite pronouncements and in secret midnite kidnappings of children. These events are forcing us into defending our lives, our neighbors [near-&-far, known-&-unknown], and our sacred honor…
B. Reflections on the primary executive of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
(period 2015-2018, mostly). [This period includes the secret kidnapping of children by U.S. personnel under the direct guidance of D. J. Trump, Jeff Sessions, Kirsten Nielsen, and multiple co-conspirators.]
Mr. D.J. Trump, the present Godfather of the Republican party, has sometimes been described as a man of unusually small empathetic capacity — "even for a politician" according to those who tend to distrust politicians. Of course, Donald Trump's American variety of fascism was not created by Donald Trump alone. Even if we were to talk only about the last Presidential election — culpable errors by Hilary Clinton, James Comey, and the fascinated press were needed for the Trump Campaign to successfully employ their Russian helpers in their search for the Presidency. Authoritarian movements and impulses are a constant — if fluctuating component of the lives of a ll nations. Furthermore, the United State's most recent strong turn towards vindictive authoritarianism does not exist in a vacuum — the world as a whole has been overwhelmed — at times by the new powers and temptations of the digital age. These are — it seems — both the best of times and the worst of times. At the very moment that miracles of individual health, social communication, and cosmological distant galaxies are discovered to — new cyber crimes, localized slavery, and genocidal acts are seemingly perpetrated at will in various parts of our brave new world.
A Deeper View!!?
I would like to suggest that Mr. Trump is not accurately described as 'low" on empathy. I would like to say that the coupling of his zeal for private vengeance coupled to his deep sense of many people's fears — his knack, as it were, for ferreting out the darker angels in many voters and politicians — bespeak a very large, but unusually dark heart. Mr. Trump has a rotten heart — it is not a 'small' heart. Rather, it is a diseased heart which 'expands' as his 'victories' fail to satisfy his unobtainable narcissistic fantasies. There are clearly age-related issues of rigidity as well as a psychological obsessive inability to respect the truth. However, these understandable weaknesses are magnified by the rot and poison at the core of his soul. While I believe that we must remembered that 'There but for the grace of God go I' — we must also remember that when any of us make our private or public deals with the devil we will in time fall into the awful purgatory and fire of God's cleansing grace. The 'devil' is not the 'friend' of Donald Trump and his followers … or of any one of us.
Lon Clay Hill, Jr.
35 minutes after the beginning of the Northern Hemisphere Summer of 2018
3 Books:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1951; 1953) Letters and Papers from Prison. Reginald H. Fuller, translator. Macmillan.
Rolf Hochhuth (1961; 1964) The Deputy. Richard Winston & Clara Winston, translators. Grove: New York.
Hannah Arendt (1963) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press: New York. 312 pages.
