Fredrik Logevall’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the 35th President begins with him observing and sorting through what he was witnessing below his Berlin balcony.
“JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917 - 1956” recounts a 22-year-old Harvard senior processing the relentless propaganda that warned of imminent Polish aggression against the Reich. Logevall paints a vivid picture of John Kennedy looking at a mosaic of Nazi uniforms. They were olive, green, black, brown, blue. The extremist political movement that had propelled the Fuhrer to power was a force for chaos that became so great, the Nazis became the only plausible solution to stop it. The calculus of German voters changed decisively towards the Nazi Party in a volatile era in which voters electorally obliterated it in 1928, before resurrecting it in 1930, following the economic crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. In the end, the political chaos was confronted by giving its alchemist and inspiration responsibility for ending it. When Adolph Hitler took lawful power as German Chancellor in 1932 it took six short months to eradicate democracy from Germany. A man became the law, and the greatest crimes and catastrophe in all of the recorded history of human civilization resulted.
The United States became the preeminent world power in the war that destroyed fascism and the imperial ambitions of the Axis powers.
Today, the story of the Second World War stands at the edge of remembered history, as the participants of humanity’s greatest trial are at the end of long human life spans. The cataclysm built for many years on a rising and toxic tide of venom, lies, hate, scapegoating, dehumanization and fear. Much of that fear was born out of political violence that yielded to State violence when the Party became the State and the Leader of the Party became the nation.
The people were complicit with a mix of actions and accommodations that ranged from the eager to the transactional. People got in line because that was the easiest thing to do. A central lesson of history is that people who submit to tyranny incited by lassitude lack the grit to easily recover it. Most don’t. The submission leads to societal destruction at deep and profound levels. The eradication of love, joy and the pursuit of happiness are the awful byproducts of oppressive extremists who seek control of others. They share a philosophy that is rooted in a self-declaration of superiority against lesser groups of people whose existence isn’t just unequal, but a burden on the superior group.
This always ends up in the same terrible ditch. The people who are blamed are always the same: visible minorities, non-conformists, free thinkers, artists, musicians, authors, activists, disabled, or gay.
This raises the fundamental political question of our time: who has the wherewithal to talk about freedom in a way that can galvanize a clear majority from an apathetic slumber against a growing cancer that is metastasizing in plain sight?