You Forgot Oberstdorf

 

     Yesterday, Bill Lueders published an article in the right wing Bulwark about two books written about two vastly different subjects: The Waco standoff, which has gotten fresh scrutiny in the leadup and aftermath of Trump's recent speech there, and the KKK. They were written, respectively, by Stephan Talty and Timothy Egan. In his article, Lueders was careful to write,

Let me be clear, since there is an entire cottage industry of wags devoted to distorting comments like the one I just made: I do not think Donald Trump is exactly like David Koresh or D.C. Stephenson. Trump is obviously a racist, but I don’t think his heart is full of hatred for others based solely on the color of their skin. (I think that, on some level, he is a classic misanthrope, hating everyone but himself.) And I don’t think he is a cult leader so much as a “cult of personality” leader. 

But the parallels are worthy of attention...

     Because, as Mark Twain once said, “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”

     The point that Lueders was making was not in tying Donald Trump to Waco and especially to the rise of the Klan a century ago, but to draw similarities between the authoritarian mindsets that made all three movements possible.

     The Klan rapidly rose, especially in Indiana, and fell just as rapidly when D.C. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan, raped Madge Oberholtzer on, fittingly, the Ides of March, 1925. Based on Oberholtzer's deathbed testimony, Stephenson was tried and convicted of her rape and murder that same year. At its peak, Indiana's Klan membership was at least 250,000. By 1928, it was fewer than 4000.

 

     You wouldn't know it, to see the Klan's last gasp of relevance when 50,000 Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in the summer of that year and were cheered on by at least 200,000 supporters. My character, Kelley McCarthy, a New York Times crime reporter, draws a parallel in Hollywoodland between the end of our isolationism in 1917 and the rise of a new nationalism represented by the rise of the KKK. She writes,

Americans began popping their vest buttons in this ridiculous new nationalism that was turning up out of somewhere (Maybe it ain’t a coincidence, but this nationalism resulted in a surge in membership with the KKK that, less than a decade later, was marching in their bedsheets in big numbers down Pennsylvania Avenue).

     But the Indiana Klan and the Branch Davidians have one thing in common and they were both co-opted by rapist, homicidal grifters who just both happened to be from Houston, TX. It was only a matter of time before someone pushed Trump into that toxic vortex where he rightfully belongs.

     As Lueder goes on to state, both men were filled with such righteous self regard and an air of invincibility that they inevitably drew those with authoritarian mindsets to them. This perfectly delineates Trump's magnetism. All three men saw loyalty as a one way street yet, for some perverse reason, that wasn't a deal-breaker. These three men had more or less successfully made these people subsume their own identities for what they were tricked into believing was for the common good.

     And that brings us to Oberstdorf, the one thing that Lueder neglected to mention.

     Oberstdorf is the southernmost village in Germany, located in Bavaria. I read about it this morning just before reading Lueder's Bulwark article and, after reading both, I immediately connected the dots. It was written by Julia Boyd for the History News Network, who had a new book of her own that also came out this month entitled, A Village in the Third Reich. In this book, Boyd brilliantly shows us how even this remote little village was not immune to the effects and influence of the international scourge of Nazism. Oberstdorf makes for a very compelling synecdoche of what Nazi-era Germany was like far from the capital of Berlin. In her article, Boyd writes,

One man, Heinz Schubert, who claimed descent from the composer’s family, was responsible for organizing the murder of 700 Roma in the Crimea. What did he tell his wife and friends when he was back in Oberstdorf? Later at his Nuremberg trial, he stated, “we thought we were saving Western civilization.”

      Sound familiar? It should. Remember, these people from three vastly different places and time periods were tricked into suppressing their identities until they were mere extensions of the wills and personalities of Koresh, Stephenson and Hitler. And we heard very much the same thing from the January 6th rioters who still to this day claim they were "patriots" and were willing to kill lawmakers, Congressional leaders and even policemen, were willing to burn down our democratic republic in order to "save" it from liberals, antifa and Black Lives Matter. They legitimately thought they were preserving the results of an election that they really lost.

     Donald Trump put himself square on the back of that roiling storm that Alexander Hamilton warned us men like Trump would ride in their quest for power and impunity. He "directed the whirlwind" straight to the steps of the Capitol and beyond, even almost getting his own Vice President killed.

     Because the rioters thought they, too, were saving America, democracy and, by extension, "western civilization." Just as Stephenson's followers thought they were saving white, Protestant civilization, just as Koresh's followers thought they were saving much the same thing.

     And beneath it all was a raw, festering undertone of grievance. The grievance of being outcasts after WWI, the grievance of white people angered by the end of slavery, the grievance of a cult that thought was persecuted by heathens. And the grievance of a white minority terrified of seeing their numerical and political dominance get worn down to a nub.

     Human societies, including entire nationalities, will always feel a sense of unjustified loss and grievance, some for misplaced reasons, others for good reasons. But wherever there's a people dissatisfied with their lot, there will always be grifters and hucksters like D.C. Stephenson, David Koresh, Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump to seize on those grievances and pretend to make them his. And the inevitable downfall of these men and their movements only feeds into more grievance and a crushing sense of loss.

     But we must ask ourselves why, when Donald Trump says, "I alone can fix this", he also feels the need to incite a mob to do his bidding.