On October 1rst First published Judy Gelman Myers’ interview with Hava Beller. In sometimes soaring language I regret inelegantly abridging, Meyers writes that “The Trump administration will barrel ahead unless it is stopped by an insurmountable force. What force?…we can look to an unexpected source: Nazi Germany. In the documentary The Restless director Hava Beller details…the little-known German resistance, men and women of all classes, political thought, and religious persuasions who attempted to stop Hitler through individual, resolute acts of conscience. They were unable to constitute an insurmountable force against Hitler, but they embodied the qualities we may need to confront Trump in extremis.”
I may have misread Myers and Beller, but to my eye they agree that the Trump administration meaningfully resembles or may soon resemble the regime the German resistance opposed. I do not think this is true. They also seem to believe that an anti-Trump resistance may yet prove necessary (“in extremis”) and should look to the example of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany. I do not think this is true either, not least because a fair number of the very brave people in the tiny German resistance had no desire to restore parliamentary democracy, being either national conservatives or Communists, and a lot of the former tended to think that the Jews who’d survived the Third Reich had no place in a post-Hitler Germany, no objection to the Nuremberg laws, and no intention of returning all of Hitler conquests in either the east or the west. They remain vastly admirable, as do the other resisters, and anyone visiting Berlin should visit the very small and somewhat obscure museum in the Bendlerblock. But they are not us.
A number of Americans who oppose Trump have already (and for the last three years) termed themselves ‘the resistance’, thus implying that they are in some meaningful way like either the German resistance or other Second World War European resistance movements, which entails thinking the absurd—that the Trump Administration meaningfully resembles the Third Reich. Any claimed resemblance to a grossly outnumbered European resistance is particularly odd twenty-four days from an election most analysts think Trump will probably lose, and possibly lose badly. No European resistance movement had access to the ballot. We do, opposition to Trump is the sentiment of the majority, and the “insurmountable force” that will stop Trump seems likeliest to be the same one that stopped Grover Cleveland. This is just as well, because the French resistance, vastly larger than the German, included perhaps two percent of the population, and only got anywhere near two percent if resistance is defined as loosely as on a single occasion looking at a leaflet left on a park bench. The German resistance was a minute section of the German population. While Hitler was winning he became increasingly popular, and even when he was losing the German resistance movements were much smaller than any other resistance movement in Europe, unless one redefines resistance by including acts like regularly attending church. German historians who’ve so broadly defined resistance have had the honesty to coin a new word for it—what elsewhere in Europe would be accounted (however loosely) resistance are in German called Widerstand; acts counted under the fantastically broader new definition are called Resistenz.
How plausible is the underlying implied comparison of the Trump administration to a Nazi, Fascist or fascistoid regime? Consider one of the most odious Trumpean acts, forcibly separating the children from parents, with some children then housed in conditions in which some of them died, which almost immediately aroused enough disgust that it was (at least publicly) abandoned. To most Americans this was probably as close to the tactics and crimes of our old enemies as we’ve so far come. How close was it? Pick the most memorable example of the Third Reich separating children from parents: a few years ago, after the death of one of my closest friends, I learned from his widow that her mother-in-law became one of Mengele’s victims when, pregnant on arrival in Auschwitz, she’d been forced to select which of her embryos would suffer one fate, which another. Mengele represents a limit case, but one to be remembered when the comparison is attempted.
Another limit case: the contents of the vitrines at Auschwitz, which I saw thirteen months after Trump’s 2016 electoral victory. Comparisons to Trump’s America would have been particularly bizarre when standing before vitrines filled with jumbled multi-hued heaps of hair (and a roll of the cloth the Germans wove from it), eyeglasses, prosthetic limbs, dentures, children’s toys, the brightly colored cooking pots apparently favored by Eastern European Jews which the victims were told to bring with them for their resettlement, also their suitcases, all awaiting shipment back to the Reich to be distributed to Germans and kept in warehouses the prisoners called Canadas, that name suggesting to them fabulous wealth. Past the vitrines, a very long corridor lined with photos of Polish women, almost all of whom had chosen to risk Auschwitz through some act of rebellion, which however petty was always, because of its known possible consequences, shockingly brave. Those Polish slave workers had been resisters. By their standards, and by the standards of any other European resistance movement, we are not.
A discussion last week with a student reading the Iliad in a tutorial may clarify what’s at issue. We were contrasting the gods in the Iliad and the Aeneid, and one of us noted that an Iliadic hero definitionally risks an early and possibly agonizing death—it is why he is heroic–but a god or goddess wielding weapons against a human hero is essentially comical, because a god quite literally has no skin in the game. American ‘resisters’ against Trump almost inevitably have no skin in the game, because no American ‘resister’ has yet suffered the fate every European resister knowingly risked. A ‘resister’ is not a resister because of how and at what probable cost she or he ‘resists’. Trump is not Hitler, Laval, Mussolini, Antonescu, Szálasi, Pavelic, Horthy, Tiso, Nedić or any of the others. Those who oppose Trump are of course right, and his most admirable opponents have risked and lost jobs—which is why they are admirable, rather than merely right. We do not honor them by affording ourselves a preposterously extravagant title—we instead risk making ourselves ridiculous, not entirely unlike the way Trump, a notorious coward who long resisted visiting troops in combat zones, makes himself ridiculous with hilarious self-praise of his own embattled courage. All of the memorials to any very small German atrocity—one stumbles over a lot of little markers to handfuls of civilians shot by the Wehrmacht or SS in Belgium and France, usually reprisals for resistance actions, should make this point for Americans: we are not them. Any of the scores of thousands of Stolpersteine—‘stumbling stones’, 4 inch square brass plates set into sidewalks in front of the homes in which Hitler’s victims lived, inscribed with the names and dates of their births and deaths—makes vast Auschwitz’s point with startling economy. We run no plausible risk of being them. Trump, a cruel, thieving, ranting buffoon, dangerous as he is to the most helpless of his victims, has nothing to do with what killed them. If, as seems so likely, we bring him down in a bit over three weeks, we will be acting as citizens, not as an organized underground movement. We need not claim more than our share of honor.