Befehl ist Befehl

Today, Memorial Day, we are honoring the men and women who gave their lives in defense of their country. Most of them did not die repelling a foreign invader – the last time a foreign enemy set foot on American soil was the War of 1812.

No, they died in defense of something altogether intangible. They died defending words.

Words like freedom, equality, democracy and justice.

Mostly they died defending those words in other countries, because they knew what those words meant and they knew they must be defended everywhere.

They attacked fascism where it lived.

Now it is here. It demands blind faith. It corrupts those words to its own ends. It bludgeons people with fear.

And, because it is the politics of the bully, it makes war on children.

That is the line in the sand.

For that, there must be zero tolerance.

No one needs to know the legalities involved in the current practice of separating children from their parents at the border. Every decent person knows in his or her heart that it is immoral. It flies in the face of God.

Acting Chief Carla Provost of the U.S. Border Patrol

It is time to watch Judgement at Nuremberg again. Time to remember that the international court ruled that the so-called Nuremberg defense – ‘I was just following orders’ – is sometimes no defense at all.

The Nuremberg defense is often called ‘Befehl ist Befehl’ in German – orders are orders,

“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” (Nuremberg Principal IV)

Stop the War on Children. Give those babies back to their mothers.

Put that on a postcard and send it to Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at the Department of Homeland Security. And send another to Carla Provost, Acting Chief of the US border Patrol.

 

Another outstanding American

Happy birthday to Thomas Nast, born 172 years ago today – he gave us, among other things, Uncle Sam, the modern Santa Claus and the Republican elephant, though he is most associated with his political lampooning of Tammany Hall.

Nast self-portrait

Oh wait – he wasn’t really an American; Nast was born  in Landau, Germany to – and I love this  – a trombonist in the Bavarian regimental band.

But his father was a socialist, not a good thing in 19th century Germany, so he sent his family to New York City  and joined them eventually.

Nast seems to have inherited his father’s politics. After nearly flunking out of school, he graduated from the National Academy of Design and went to work for Frank Leslie’s newspaper, then Harper’s Weekly.

After depicting the battlefields of the Civil War, Nast returned to NYC and  took on Tammany Hall and ‘Boss’ Tweed, devoting himself to ridiculing and exposing the corruption of the Tweed Ring over the course of 1870 and 1871.

Nast so stirred up public opinion that Boss Tweed offered him a bribe to cease and desist – no less than $100,000. Nast toyed with Tweed until the offer was upped to half a million dollars (in 1871!), but then said, No, I don ‘t think so.

Eventually, the Ring fell apart and Boss Tweed fled to Spain to escape prosecution, but the Spanish authorities – using a Nast cartoon for identification purposes – caught him and returned him to the US,

Nast continued to fight the good fight, opposing segregation and the Ku Klux Klan and was one of very few political cartoonists to champion Native Americans and Chinese Americans.

The Nast Santa

He left Harpers in 1886 and instantly lost much of his clout. Theodore Roosevelt named him Consul to Ecuador in 1902, but shortly after his arrival he died during a yellow fever epidemic, He is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

And now, let’s review, just for the hell of it, the sonnet  by Emma Lazarus that became a policy – though it’s not often  honored:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Plus ca change

Surviving bit of Hadrian's Wall. Photo by Bill Gats

Sometime in the fall of 122 AD – maybe it was September 13, maybe not – the Romans began to build a wall on the frontier of Great Britain.  Too many incursions by raiders from the north prompted the Emperor Hadrian to order the construction.

Things around the Empire had gotten too loose during Trajan’s reign and Hadrian was clamping down.  The wall was the most heavily fortified of any the Romans built and it had garrisons spaced at various points to help repel invaders.

The garrisons weren’t large, so it is assumed that the purpose was to keep out cattle-raiders and unwanted immigrants.  Sounding familiar yet?

Map by Norman Enstein

Twenty years later they built another wall further north – the Antonine Wall – to keep the pesky Picts out of their hair.

Hadrian’s wall remained intact for about three hundred years until finally Britons of all sorts started using the stones for roads and houses and other things that were much more useful than a wall.

Interestingly, the Roman empire had already begun its famous decline not long after the wall was completed.