Hollywood made several films in the ruins of Berlin, during the late 1940s. In Germany the films of that period are called Truemmerfilme, or rubble films.
They shone a light on the conditions endured by those who had followed Hitler to his end. They tried not to romanticize it and they didn’t say the people didn’t deserve it. Hollywood simply wove human stories around the ruins, making them a character, a reality to be dealt with. The most accessible may be an English film, Carol Reed’s The Third Man, shot in Vienna with Orson Welles.
At some point Americans will face the same thing with Trump. At some point his regime will be gone and we’ll be left to pick up the pieces. There will be an era in American history that’s A.T. – After Trump.
In the ruins of Nazi Germany, all the Good Germans insisted they didn’t know. It became the conquerors’ job to make them know, to take them into the camps and force the horror into their memories. (Marlene Dietrich, a heroine of World War II, did this exceedingly well.) Then, it became the job of the new West German government to keep the evil history alive. It did this well enough that Germany became the beating heart of a different, more united Europe.
But to become the center of NATO, and the European Community, Germans had to accept collective responsibility. None who remained, and none who came after, could pretend they didn’t know.
The same will be true in America.
Trump Didn’t Do It
Right now, liberals love to say, “Trump did this” or “Trump did that.” But Trump hasn’t done any of it. We have done it. The American people chose this path. We elected this jamoak, and by a bigger vote than Hitler ever won.
I know, I know. You didn’t vote for him. I didn’t vote for him, either. But his regime is the product of our collective will. All the evil being done right now is being done in our name, not his, and the result will be our shame, because he has none, and neither do the small-minded men and women around him.
There is a festival of hate and scapegoating happening in this country right now. We blame Iran, we blame Russia, we blame immigrants or blacks or “the woke.” But the fault is not in our stars, it’s in ourselves. We, the people, have allowed ourselves to be poisoned, and this poison cannot be expunged except through blood.
Will it be my blood? Maybe. Will it be your blood, or that of your children? Maybe. We don’t know right now.
Just don’t pretend that you weren’t warned, or that all this is someone else’s fault. It’s a collective responsibility, it’s the fault of each of us, that we didn’t do enough, we didn’t teach enough, we let ourselves become complacent enough and self-satisfied enough to allow all these things to happen. And when it all redounds against us, when the blood drawn by our lash is met by an equal amount drawn from the sword, we will have to say that the judgement of God is all good, all together.
So shut up about what Trump is doing. You’re doing it. I’m doing it. That’s what your grandchildren, if there are any, will remember from these times.
