Watching clips of the testimony of Capitol Police before the House Select Committee today, I could not get out of my mind a single number attached to the 20 year Weimar Republic, which emerged out of World War One as an interregnum between that war and the next: Over that period there were roughly 500 assassinations, which is to say murders of politicians, public officials in Germany, mostly in Berlin and almost all of them murdered by right wingers, Nazis.
There were also innumerable beatings by Nazi street thugs we often tend to write off as sort of "boys will be boys" sort of stuff, but as Christopher Isherwood describes one beating, he noted the eye of the Jew attacked hung out of its socket, drooping on his cheek and his skull was clearly fractured.
The videos released recently show the thugs attacking the Capitol stabbing at police with flag poles, battering them with clubs, but nowhere evident are the attack rifles or other guns we have heard were carried by the attackers. And we hear no gunfire.
Watching the losers parading through the Capitol, sitting in Nancy Pelosi's chair, there was almost a clownish atmosphere of the inmates in charge of the asylum and not quite sure what to do with the place. Oh, they smeared feces on the walls, which a certain type of mental defective will do--feces are often the calling card of that sort of derangement.
It has been widely reported that of the 2300 sworn officers only about 800 were on duty that day despite the widely advertised intent of organizing a mob to overwhelm the Capitol. No National Guard lined up to protect the building.
There was a time, some of us remember, when the National Guard did line up with rifles pointed and fired and shot down unarmed students at Kent State. And there were ample examples of Trumps troops festooned with T shirts saying, "The Civil War Starts Now!" So you know there were provocateurs in that crowd, hoping to start something which would ignite a real conflagration.
It doesn't take much imagination to think there were rifles under those jackets, men just hoping for a firing line from the government so they could finally use all those attack rifles and rocket launchers they had been cherishing and collecting for the great apocalypse they so desired.
Some of the half wits floating before the cameras smiling and sending pictures home to their mothers were nothing more than men with the mental age of children playing a sort of "Role Playing Game" the same guys who play with foam swords on weekends.
For others, more adult plans were no doubt afoot.
When the crowds in Idaho gathered before the Randy Weaver homestead at Ruby Ridge, to block the federal police, they shouted out slogans about the apocalypse and Weaver had attended meetings of Aryan Nation types who predicted an Armageddon conflict, a war between the races for control and supremacy over America.
One Capitol Police officer testified today, repeating the words of his attackers: "This nigger here voted for Biden!" But on national TV and NPR the word "nigger" was bleeped out and reporters told us in stricken tones the attackers had used the "N word."
As if the Republic would come crashing down if America heard the word "Nigger."
As if we are all just such delicate flowers, such snowflakes, that we could not tolerate hearing that word.
Well, maybe we ought to hear that word in public. Maybe we need a raw image, a raw sound. After all, it was only when the video of that police knee on George Floyd's neck was shown that justice got done.
Which makes me think again about Weimar and how Germans heard every day about murders by thugs and became inured to it; when you do the arithmetic there must have been roughly two murders of public officials, those who believed in democracy as opposed to a strongman, every month during the Weimar years.
Now, of course, we have suffered through random mass shootings/murders in America for at least 20 years, but there is no clear political aspect to this; the slaughter thus far is simply deranged men shooting or guns gone wild, depending on your thinking.
Suppose, for a moment, some national guard unit had shown up, or that the Capitol police had been issued rifles and when that crowd of 3000 or so breached the barriers, the assembled government had fired and the men in the crowd brought out their attack rifles and hundreds of police, Guardsmen and civilians had been shot dead. Would the election have been confirmed and would Joseph Biden have been inaugurated on time?
Or would we have seen a Weimar Republic collapse like the one following the Reichstag fire?
Perhaps it was best that cop had to suffer the "Nigger" slur but did not shoot anyone and perhaps the smartest tactic was allowing the crowd into the building, avoiding conflict, as some officers did, allowing the deplorables to smear feces and carry off souvenirs of their rampage.
But that leaves us with the problem of the attackers looking more like simpletons out doing their Role Playing rather than serious threats to our democracy and social order.
The problem is that such a crowd always contains some Timothy McVeigh's, who will blow up a federal building given the chance, along with many boy/men who live in their parents' basements, who work as shelf stockers at warehouses and play with foam swords in the parks on weekends with their friends.
And when we complain about that onslaught we get Republicans saying, oh, it wasn't so bad, just some rowdies letting off steam, a normal tourist group, or just a little more than that maybe, but certainly not Nazis on a rampage.
The challenge for the Democrats to to figure out which image will hurt the Trump crowd the most: The wacky, trailer trash Buffalo man with his horns shouting in the face of the police, a pathetic looney, but basically harmless, like a streaker exposing his own inadequacy. Buffalo man as the image is just not the same as that girl, arm outstretched kneeling by the body of a dead student at Kent State.
What image could become as potent as that girl at Kent State? To my mind, it was that image which brought Nixon down. He was connected to that dead student, who he had called a "bum."
To what image can Trump or Jim Jordan or McCarthy be connected?
The question is: Is there any lowlife form low enough which would hurt the Republicans at this point?
It wasn't until the townspeople were marched out of their villages and forced to help bury the dead at the concentration camps that the German folk really had to face what their gentile hate had wrought. American Army commanders made sure the Germans, who had to be able to smell the camps from their cozy little towns, were made to rub their faces in the filth they had ignored and tacitly endorsed.
Somehow, Democrats have to figure out how to do that with Republicans--preferably before the bodies stink and the air is filled with death.
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