Who Are The People?

“We Are The People” is a powerful phrase often used to support revolution against tyrannical authority. It may first have been employed by the German Georg Büchner in his 1835 play about the French Revolution, “Danton’s Death”, shouted by a revolutionary citizen. The idea that the people are the ultimate political authority was itself revolutionary in the late 18^th century. Against the inherited power of kings, who claimed sanction from God, revolutionaries in France and America asserted the right of the people to govern itself.

The men who signed our Declaration of Independence acted “by Authority of the good People of these Colonies”.  “We the People”, written in enormous letters, begins our Constitution. Not all people were part of The People. Our Constitution refers to slaves as “other persons” counted as three-fifths of a full person, most Native Americans did not count at all, and women were not mentioned anywhere.

Since then, the argument that the people are the only legitimate authority has spread across the globe, used both to defend democracy and to justify dictatorship. Extremes of right and left claimed to represent the people, but used exclusive definitions of who the people were. The Nazis said they were creating a “Volksgemeinschaft”, a “people’s community”, which only included genetically healthy “Aryans”. All others should be killed. After World War II, Communist China and most Eastern European Communist states called themselves “People’s Republics”, but the only people who counted were Party members with the correct ideology.

When crowds in Leipzig began demonstrating against the East German version of communism in 1989, they adopted the slogan “Wir sind das Volk” to convince the heavily armed police not to shoot at them. Within a week, the number of protesters in Leipzig reached over 100,000. They and tens of thousands of marchers in other East German cities carried banners saying “Wir sind das Volk”. This claim of ultimate sovereignty, backed up by mass demonstrations, brought down Communist governments in Eastern Europe.

This version of “the people” echoes earlier struggles against authoritarian governments, bringing together people from below to fight the powers above. “We are the people” united classes, genders and ethnicities to collectively look up at rulers and attack their legitimacy. The 21^st-century liberal consensus is that unity of all kinds of different people is the correct goal. The people is an expansive and welcoming body in the sense of the verses inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.

Conservatives, on the other hand, argue that the people is a fixed and homogeneous category, defined by nationality, biology, and heritage. Those who don’t belong can never belong. The genocidal methods of 19^th-century American governments towards Native Americans, expanded by the Nazis and their allies in Europe, are no longer acceptable. Conservatives these days prefer deportation, which was the Nazis’ favored method in their first few years in power, when hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews were forced out of Germany.

Under the guise of “populism”, conservatives seem to attack “elites” from below, but actually focus on attacking social groups regarded as different from above. In Trump’s America and in many European countries, right-wing political formations of white Christians attack immigrants, those with darker skin, Muslims and sometimes Jews as not belonging to “the people”. In these cases, “we the people” look down on already subordinated groups, blame them for the ills of society, and try to exclude them.

The far right German group Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, or PEGIDA, has adopted the slogan “Wir sind das Volk” to support their attacks on Muslims. Their founder, Lutz Bachmann, called immigrants “trash” and “cattle”. The right-wing Alternative for Germany attacks the large Turkish minority. The new conservative German interior minister said that Islam does not belong in Germany.

Closer to home, two women were arrested in Arizona last week after they filmed themselves insulting Islam and stealing items from a mosque. They shouted at a man coming out of the mosque, “We’re coming after you, we the people. That’s right, you guys are on your way out.”

Many Republicans appear to believe that the minority who support them are the only legitimate people. Rick Saccone, candidate for Congress in Pennsylvania, spoke last week about “the other side”, the Democrats: “They have a hatred for our president. And I tell you, many of them have a hatred for our country....They have a hatred for God.”

Saccone lost, but I looked in vain for any Republican politician who rejected Saccone’s comments. No Republican leader has the courage of John McCain, who corrected a supporter who said she couldn’t trust Barack Obama because he was an Arab. McCain said, “No, ma’am.... I want everyone to be respectful ... because that’s the way politics should be conducted in America.” When a man at a Trump rally in 2015 said Muslims were a problem in America and Obama was a Muslim, Trump responded, “Right.”

That’s the way politics are conducted by conservatives in America today. Only we the people can change that.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin, Germany

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, March 20, 2018

Promise and Flaw in Organized Religion

Last year was the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 1517 proclamation of objections to Catholic Church practices. At age 33, Luther, chair of theology at the University of Wittenberg, wrote a scholarly treatise titled “Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences”, later called his 95 Theses. He sent it to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz and Magdeburg.

Luther’s criticisms were well founded. Representatives of the Pope traveled around selling indulgences, the right to confess all sins on the death bed, thereby giving the buyer complete absolution. Some Christians were not confessing their sins in church, because they could buy this right to confess everything at the end. In Wittenberg, indulgences were advertised as paying for the new St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, but the funds were used by Archbishop Albrecht to pay debts from purchasing his archbishopric from the Pope. Luther wrote, “Any Christian who is truly repentant has a right to full remission of all penalty and guilt without any letter of indulgence.”

Luther swiftly broadened his attack on the Catholic Church and the Pope as its head. In his pamphlet “To the Christian Nobles of the German Nation” in 1520, he argued that the Church does not need worldly possessions and that a congregation should select its own priest. He later wrote that a Christian achieves salvation by faith alone, without needing a hierarchical church structure, and that the Pope does not have the exclusive right to interpret scripture.

Luther was forced to defend himself before Papal representatives, who demanded that he recant, and at the Diet of Worms, an assembly of many German states in the Holy Roman Empire. When the Pope issued a papal bull threatening to excommunicate him, Luther publicly burned it. He was excommunicated and forced to hide from arrest.

Unlike others who had challenged the Catholic Church and the power of the Pope, Luther masterfully used the new technology of printing to spread his ideas. Courageous and determined, he successfully appealed to common Christians. Communities across northern Europe and, more important, their local rulers adopted his religious reforms, transforming Europe by splitting the Protestant North from the Catholic South.

Luther’s followers in Wittenberg created a community chest administered jointly by town, church, and congregation to feed the hungry, allow poor students to study, and offer credit to poor artisans. Luther believed that everybody should be educated to read the Bible in their native tongue, so primary schools were expanded, including for girls.

At first, Luther appeared to be sympathetic to Jews. He wrote in 1519, “What Jew would consent to enter our ranks when he sees the cruelty and enmity we wreak on them—that in our behavior towards them we less resemble Christians than beasts?”That behavior was publicly exhibited at Luther’s own City Church St. Mary’s of Wittenberg. High on one outside wall was a “Judensau”, a relief depicting Jews suckling at a pig, with words degrading rabbis and Jewish ideas about God. It had decorated the Church for two hundred years.

Luther was a great reformer of Christian religious practice and social thinking. But the religious community he wished to create was welcoming only for those who followed his lead. Luther condemned in the strongest terms anyone who refused to give up their religion for his. He named the Pope the Antichrist. He pronounced the harshest sentence on Jews who remained true to their beliefs. In “On the Jews and Their Lies” in 1543, Luther advised his followers to burn their synagogues, confiscate their valuables, take away their holy books, forbid them from owning houses, and prevent their rabbis from preaching. That year, Luther wrote a pamphlet defending the Wittenberg Judensau as correctly depicting the source of Jewish holy books in the pig’s anus. Good Christians must prevent Jews from living as Jews.

Many organized religions represent communities of exclusivity, where insiders are promised glorious rewards and outsiders suffer unending torment. For centuries after Luther, Protestants and Catholics warred against each other. Christians only stopped killing Jews a half century ago. Muslim Shia and Muslim Sunni kill each other in the Middle East. Despite powerful moral exhortations about non-violence, Buddhists attack Muslims in south Asia. After suffering near extinction in Europe because of their religion, Jews destroyed Palestinian communities in the 1940s.

A highway billboard near our home in Wisconsin says I will go to hell, because I don’t share a particular form of Christian belief. Orthodox Jews have enough power over Israeli politics to enforce religious rules which exclude me and my children.

Religions are the strongest propagators of peaceful messages, but religious communities have killed millions of people who follow other beliefs. The contradictions in Luther’s teachings eventually forced the world’s Lutheran churches to disavow his writings about Jews, but only after the Nazis had put into genocidal practice his written instructions.

Even such disavowals often come with caveats. The official statement of the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church about Jews deplores discrimination, but is mainly concerned that Luther’s words could provoke anti-Lutheranism, and ends with the hope that Jews will finally see the light and convert.

Luther was a great and flawed man. Like all human creations, religions can raise us up or bring us pain.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin, Germany

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, March 13, 2018

Off With Their Heads!

An historical film is attracting audiences in Berlin. “The Silent Classroom” offers a fictionalized version of a remarkable protest in East Germany and the more remarkable government reaction. In 1956, thousands of Hungarians fought to free their country from Soviet domination and one-party dictatorship. A class of seniors preparing for final exams heard of the revolt from the American radio station in West Berlin, which the East German government had forbidden its citizens to listen to. Hungarians asked people in other countries to stay silent to protest Communist oppression. One student, Dietrich Garstka, told his comrades, “We’ll do that too!” In class, everyone was silent for five minutes.

The government went crazy. The Hungarian revolt of 1956 had installed a democratic socialist government before Soviet tanks crushed the uprising three weeks later. The Soviets and the other Communist governments in eastern Europe defined the revolt as counter-revolution and asserted that Western spies were behind it. The Western news media who reported the Hungarians’ program for freedom and human rights were spreading false propaganda. Students who silently honored the uprising were counter-revolutionaries, too.

Specialists interrogated the students. The Minister of Education insulted and threatened the students: unless they named the ringleaders, the whole class would not be allowed to take the exams which qualified them for university. The class displayed extraordinary solidarity and refused to give in to government pressure. They were all thrown out of school.

Garstka soon crossed the border into West Germany, which was still relatively easy in 1956, and was followed by 15 of the other 19 students in his class. They took their exams there and pursued their careers, cut off from family and friends.

The system that transformed their silence into subversion was a perfectly self-contained organism. All media were monitored and controlled. Information about internal problems, weaknesses, and injustices was propaganda, fake news designed to weaken the system, and thus counter-revolution. Anyone who taught uncomfortable facts about history or politics was labeled an accomplice of Western enemies, a hater of the system, and punished with the weight of the state. Science was not allowed to contradict political ideology.

East German communism had very different intentions and assumptions than the Nazi government which it replaced. But both systems shared this enclosed structure of self-protection, where deviation was treason, where facts were subordinated to rigid ideology, where questioning was punished by exclusion. Both saw only black and white, and jailed people who realized there was grey.

Those structures are the opposite of democracy. But the forces of arrogant ideology, of undoubting righteousness, of hatred for difference can exploit the tolerance of democratic systems to disrupt them from within. The extraordinary democracy of the German Weimar Republic in the 1920s allowed the Nazis to grow strong enough to overthrow it. Or I should say that too many people in Germany, people with power and influence, through weakness, self-interest, and political expediency, let the Nazis come to power by not opposing them strongly enough.

Now in America we saw armed men, who disdain our elected government, take over a public installation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, threaten government officials and then escape without punishment. We heard a presidential candidate encourage his supporters to beat protesters and disbelieve any news he doesn’t like. We see virtually all leading Republican politicians accept Trump’s vilification of the press, self-enrichment in office, and smearing of the judiciary.

Americans who report on these events are attacked with verbal violence. I have been called seditious, a traitor. Activists for civil rights have been called communists and anarchists, whose political activities are thus illegitimate. The whole progressive movement, whose candidate, Bernie Sanders, almost won the Democratic nomination for President, is identified as hating America. Thousands screamed that the losing candidate in the last election should be put in jail. They say that journalists who report uncomfortable information about politicians they like are spreading lies. Many people have urged this newspaper to stop publishing my articles, because they don’t like the facts I write about.

Listen to the radio, scroll around the internet, or go to rallies for the President, and you’ll find many people with these attitudes. Instead of lurking on the fringes of the American political system, these people are brought into the White House and given press credentials as if they were real journalists. The President has called journalists “sick people” who hate our country and the other party “un-American” and “treasonous”. Telling the truth and defending democracy means being bombarded with insults and threats from the small far right minority, who only see black and white.

What if they had full power in our government? What would they do with me, the traitor? Or our journalists, professors, scientists? Or you?

We must prevent that, to avoid repeating the naive complacency of other peoples who have allowed their freedoms to be taken away. Asserting your right to think and act freely can be dangerous, as the East German students realized. But they demonstrated solidarity, courage, and determination in the face of naked shameless power.

We have to do that, too.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin, Germany

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, March 6, 2018