How does the sky fall?
Three years ago Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote about an unanswered question from his youth that had always intrigued him.
Here is how he put it:
One of the questions that haunted me when I was growing up was: how did the German people ever get to a point where they permitted a dictator to commit genocide while they went about their daily business?
I would ask adults how this could happen but no one could give me a rational answer.
I think they were just as baffled.
When I was a kid, I asked the same questions, and never received an answer that made sense. Yet each time I asked, there was always reassurance offered that “it couldn’t happen in America.”
I’m not sure what day it was during the Trump years that I understood how wrong that was, but I have long realized the American immunity to despotism is less than I imagined.
There were no masked Gestapo killing Americans when Mr. Abdul-Jabbar posed his question.
There were no plans to convert warehouses into concentration camps.
Americans have no natural immunities to tyranny beyond our traditions of defiance.
We are no better than any other peoples in the world.
The great progress in America towards justice and equality should never obscure the sickening reality that when the Nazis looked for precedents to write the Nuremberg Race Laws, they found them in the miscegenation laws of the American South.
These were the rearguard actions of defeated racists whose slaves were liberated, plantations occupied and society destroyed militarily in a civil war that lasted from 1861 to 1865.
There are great debates that are raging around the teaching of history and its meaning that are a proxy for the culture war that American politics has produced and is worsening.
Mostly, these debates are over the shameful censoring of reality.
They comfort the political sensibilities and intellectual frailties of jingoes who don’t understand the American idea, ideals, story and suffering that has occurred as the gap between our values and reality has been contested and closed over 250 years.
When it comes to the question that intrigued us both as kids, the search for an answer and deep understanding may be the most common sensical area of study that could conceivably be taught to current generations.
It puts a simple and singular question forward: how did that happen?
How did Hitler rise, and how did a civilized nation of poets, composers, philosophers, authors, writers and scientists succumb to it?
Truly, there may be no more important question that deserves constant discussion, debate, understanding and scholarship.
The reason for this is simple.
The war started by Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich nearly cracked that foundation of human civilization.
It came close to destroying the world, and when it was over, everyone who survived understood that the world would not survive its next conflagration.
When Little Marco speaks of “erasure” he does so with language that is more than an echo of the hatreds that nearly erased all of humanity.
The study of this era is urgent in this moment of growing danger.
Understanding what happened in Europe during the first 45 years of the 20th century is of profound importance to keeping America safe from catastrophes in the 21st century.
Democracy, as Winston Churchill pointed out, is imperfect, but it is more perfect than all of its alternatives.
Democracy is the only philosophy of government that has ever been that places the individual above the jackboot of the state.
Democracy recognizes the innate dignity of the human being, and their rights as such.
This is absolute in a democracy where the individual is above the state, and the state is subordinate to the liberty of the individual.
From this emerges the concepts that undergird freedoms of speech, thought, conscience, worship and equality under the law.
All of these principles are under direct assault by the Trump fascists who disdain our liberty, and have decided that their right to rule should not involve the consent of the governed.
When World War II ended much of the world was in ruins.
The death toll marked the war as human civilization’s most devastating event.
More than 80 million people were killed globally.
When it ended the victorious powers understood the Nazis crimes were unique and singular in the annals of human civilization and counted as crimes against humanity.
The victorious powers eschewed the retribution and vengeance that they could have taken, and instead demonstrated the triumph of justice over the evils of totalitarianism.
I’ve also announced a permanent pause on Third World migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries…
…We always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships.
— Donald Trump, December 9, 2025
The Nazi perpetrators were given fair trials under a rule of law that was created as a demarcation between events that occurred, and could never be permitted again, lest the human race be extinguished or regressed to prehistoric circumstances.
The most famous of these tribunals, which are remembered as the Nuremberg trials took place from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946, and tried the most senior surviving Nazis, including Hermann Goering, Julius Streicher, Albert Speer and Rudolf Hess, among others.
Two Americans played leading roles.
The first was Robert Jackson, associate justice of the US Supreme Court, and the other was former Attorney General Francis Biddle.
Jackson was the lead American prosecutor, while Biddle was the chief American judge.
Justice Jackson opened the Nuremberg trials with an opening statement that talked about what the Nazis did, and why it was important to seek justice in a court of law. His brilliant opening lasted for hours, and constitute some of the most important spoken words in the history of jurisprudence. Among them are these:
The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility.
The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.
That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.
What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. We will show them to be living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power.
They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life…. Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.
Yet, Jackson’s opening did nothing to satisfy the question of how it happened. The British prosecutor would talk about the individual actions and crimes of the perpetrators, but the French judge would talk about the German spirit in a way that stood out for Francis Biddle, who recalled it this way:
To me, François de Menthon’s summary of the French case was more interesting than any, and in many ways more moving: more interesting because he sought to distinguish and to understand the German soul within the dark atmosphere of German action; more moving because he thought and spoke of Germans as members of a group to which all human beings belonged.
The philosophy of the National Socialist party, he argued, had logically resulted in a war of conquest fought without respect for any human values.
The vast organized criminality sprang from “a crime against the spirit,” which aimed to plunge humanity back into barbarism—it was not the spontaneous savagery of a primitive race, but a reaction conscious of itself, utilizing for its ends the material means put at the disposal of mankind by contemporary science.
This doctrine, de Menthon pointed out, was based on the monstrous theory of racism. Its end was the absorption of the personality of the citizen into that of the State, and the intrinsic value of the human being was finally denied.
Anyone whose opinions differed from the official doctrine was asocial and unhealthy.
Humanism was condemned as decadent. Reason was replaced by the romance and the virility of war; violence became the test of manhood.
National Socialism in modern Germany, he concluded, was the “ultimate result of a long evolution of doctrines,” raising “inhumanity to the level of a principle.
The absorption of the personality of the citizen into the state and divergence from group thought became asocial and unhealthy, and inhumanity became principle. Isn’t that what happened?
Isn’t it happening again?
Will the outcome be the same?
Could it precipitate a tragedy that exceeds World War II, and continue the awful momentum of history that has made each century deadlier than its preceding one?
Absolutely.
David French, a principled and brilliant conservative patriot understands the phenomenon:
During the Trump years, Fox faithfully upheld its end of the bargain. If you were Republican and felt embattled for supporting Donald Trump, a quick visit to Fox (especially in prime time) would calm your mind and soothe your soul.
There you’d be reminded that the Democrats are the real radicals.
That the Democrats are the true threat to America.
And if you voted for Trump even though you were uncomfortable with some of his conduct, it was only because “they” forced your hand.
As the Trump years wore on, the prime-time messaging became more blatant.
Supporting Trump became a marker not just of patriotism, but also of courage.
And what of conservatives, like myself, who opposed Trump?
We were “cowards” or “grifters” who sold our souls for 30 pieces of silver and airtime on MSNBC.
A community that subordinates its members’ individuality into a collective that demands conformity, and requires submission to the whims of authority where truth is subjective, freedom is deviant and facts are whatever the party declares them to be, is a threat to freedom everywhere.
Why?
Because it is sustained by both growth and control, which together, is an unstable mix.
The MAGA community is such a group as is the core of Putin’s gangster state in which a cabal of his associates has plunged the world into a confrontation based on the concept of assimilation of individual and national identities into a single collective identity obedient to a leader and his power.
It is both madness and profoundly evil.
All of this is sustained by the same fuel, which is propaganda.
The lie is what drives the aggression, grievances, conspiracies and threats.
It unites a collective community into taking action that destroys the notion of humanity and obliterates human rights because the individual ceases to exist outside the realm of the state, and thus the leader.
This explains how hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners can be used as cannon fodder in pursuit of Putin’s genocide, and war crimes that seek to obliterate both national identity and individual expressions of it.
It explains why the Ukrainian children have been taken east, stolen from their nation and their families.
There are few crimes more grave.
There have always been forces that seek to subjugate and oppress the human being. They always have a cause and a reason.
Usually it is steeped in fear and ignorance, it is always fueled by lies that yield hate. When the human being disappears from the story, terrible things happen.
This is what the war in Ukraine is about.
A larger nation has invaded a smaller one nearly 80 years after the end of the Second World War.
It seeks to eradicate a national identity and people.
There are terrible crimes being committed against humanity as Russia pursues its ambitions for conquest.
Ukraine is a democracy and a European country. Fate has determined their geography, and war has come.
The United States must help Ukraine defend itself for a simple reason.
When war is declared for the purposes of extinguishing identity, it will spread until it is stopped.
The later it is stopped, the higher the cost will be.
The rise of a new American nativism has become blinded to this danger because it has been lied into an alternative reality in which American values have been undermined by a rapacious television network.
It is like a pancreatic cancer for our national security.
This moment is made more dangerous because it has been paired with so much idiocy.
The resulting mayhem is not yet at hand, but it seems like it is just around the corner.
Canada has taken advantage of the United States on Trade for many years. They are among the worst in the World to deal with, especially as it relates to our Northern Border.
— Donald Trump, February 11, 2026
We already had it [Greenland], but we returned it to Denmark. We should have kept it. We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be frankly unstoppable. But I won’t do that.
— Donald Trump, January 20, 2026
Donald Trump referred to himself as “acting president of Venezuela” in this Truth Social on January 11, 2026:
Understanding how the worst thing that has ever happened to people is important to understand — particularly at the exact moment in time when the events described stand at the boundary line between living memory and history.
There is no time better than now to reflect on “how did that happen?”
The Auschwitz exhibit, which toured the world in 2023 was titled “Not long ago. Not far away.
Indeed.
The difference between the Nazis and MAGA is quite simple to understand.
We know how the story of the former ended.
We do not know what disaster MAGA will author tomorrow.
Each century of human history has been deadlier than the last with a profound interregnum in the momentum of death that has endured for 81 years.
What Donald Trump and his gangsters are trying to destroy with lies and nonsense is what has guarded us all against Armageddon.
Understand this, my friends.
MAGA is death, and it is moving forward and pushing us into an abyss.
It must be stopped.
It is interesting to see Senator Katie Britt of Alabama is having second thoughts about the horrid abuse of children by ICE.
Normal, decent human beings would have that at their first thought.
You elected her, Alabama.
These aren't abstract historical lessons - children are already being ripped from families at borders, journalists are being threatened, and half the country cheers for it.
We're sleepwalking into fascism while arguing about gas prices.
If you are considering your priorities, let me help....this is number f@cking 1.
Mika-