Rights of Women – Vindicated

Review by Bill Doughty–

U.S. Marine Corps 1st Sgt. Jessica S. Davila, at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, March, 18, 2020. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Scott Jenkins)

Here's another book for these days of self-quarantine. Like our recent deep-dive into Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism," this is a perfect opportunity to commemorate Women's History Month and learn more. 

Mary Wollstonecraft is one of the world's first loud and proud feminists, and her "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (Penguin Books, 1792, 1992) – inspired by the U.S. Constitution and French Revolution – is considered a declaration of independence for women.

Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster

Miriam Brody edits and writes the introduction In the 1992 paperback. Brody provides a balanced review of Wollstonecraft's work and context for her life, including a troubled childhood, break-up with the father of her first daughter, a suicide attempt, and eventual contentment in marriage. Brody writes:

"Wollstonecraft's happiness was destined to be short-lived. Mary Wollstonecraft died after complications in childbirth in August 1797. Her infant daughter, Mary, survived the birth and lived to marry the poet Shelley and write the gothic novel Frankenstein, a work that many argue investigates the trauma of her own conception causing her mother's death. At the age of thirty-eight, the prophetess of modern feminism was dead of one of the oldest scourges of women. Her long struggle for liberation and a 'useful' life was ended. To those other ancient scourges, economic exploitation and restriction by prejudice and harassment of a full emotional and intellectual life, Wollstonecraft had thrown down her gauntlet."

The uproar by fundamentalists and conservatives in the wake of the publication of "Vindication" was predictable, bordering on book-burning fury over Wollstonecraft's iconoclastic views. "The response of the traditionalists emphasized a hierarchical order within society," Brody writes. To them, "respect for rank and special privileges was necessary to maintain liberty."

Not in Wollstonecraft's view. Liberty is achieved when women and men are educated and truly free. "Liberty is the mother of virtue."

Arguing for equality and social justice, she has only disdain for the rich and powerful who use their positions to discriminate against the powerless. 

She rejects the "divine right of kings" as well as the "divine right of husbands" to "enslave." In one of Wollstonecraft's calls for freedom, she writes:

"The desire of dazzling by riches, the most certain pre-eminence that man can obtain, the pleasure of commanding flattering sycophants, and many other complicated low calculations of doting self-love, have all contributed to overwhelm the mass of mankind, and make liberty a convenient handle for mock patriotism."

Wollstonecraft laments the lack of democratic representation in her country, calling it a "convenient handle for despotism." She offers this scathing view of "mere gothic grandeur" of royalty: "Taxes on the very necessities of life enable an endless tribe of idle princes and princesses to pass with stupid pomp before a gaping crowd, who almost worship the very parade which costs them so dear."

Nearly a hundred years before Lord Acton's famous discovery that "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," Wollstonecraft writes:

"Power, in fact, is ever true to its vital principle, for in every shape it would reign without control of inquiry. Its throne is built across a dark abyss, which no eye must dare to explore, lest the baseless fabric should totter under investigation. Obedience, unconditional obedience, is the catchword of tyrants of every description, and to render 'assurance doubly sure,' one kind of despotism supports another. Tyrants would have cause to tremble if reason were to become the rule of duty in any of the relations of life, for the light might spread till perfect day appeared."

King George III

The King of England at the time was George III, the same king who helped ignite the Revolutionary War in the thirteen colonies.

Wollstonecraft condemns narcissistic leaders who practice corruption and rule as tyrants:

"What but a pestilential vapour can hover over society when its chief director is only instructed in the invention of crimes, or the stupid routine of childish ceremonies? ... It is impossible for any man, when the most favourable circumstances concur, to acquire sufficient knowledge and strength of mind to discharge the duties of a king, entrusted with uncontrolled power; how then must they be violated when his very elevation is an insuperable bar to the attainment of either wisdom or virtue, when all the feelings of a man are stifled by flattery, and reflection shut out by pleasure! Sure it is madness to make the fate of thousands depend on the caprice of a weak fellow-creature, whose very station sinks him necessarily below the meanest of his subjects! But one power should be thrown down to exalt another – for all power inebriates weak man; and its abuse proves that the more equality there is established among men, the more virtue and happiness will reign in society."

Wollstonecraft's insights sound modern even if the words are from another time. For example: "The respect paid to wealth and beauty is the most certain and unequivocal, and, of course, will always attract the vulgar eye of common minds." 

Overly solicitous chivalry by men toward women, she contends, is outdated even in the late 18th century:

"I lament that women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex (gender), when in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority. It is not to bow to an inferior. So ludicrous, in fact, do these ceremonies appear to me that I scarcely am able to govern my muscles when I see a man start with eager and serious solicitude to life a handkerchief or shut a door, when the 'lady' could have done it herself, had she only moved a pace or two."

Women achieved the right to vote in the US and widely in UK in the early 20th century, more than a hundred years after Wollstonecraft's book.

These were radical views in pre-Victorian times, more than a century before women in either England or America would get the right to vote.

"Women, commonly called ladies, are not to be contradicted, in company, are not allowed to exert any manual strength; and from them the negative virtues only are expected, when any virtues are expected – patience, docility, good humour, and flexibility – virtues incompatible with any vigorous exertion of intellect."

Imagine how Wollstonecraft would react if she could see strong, educated and independent women in the United States Navy or Marine Corps today.

In "Vindication" Wollstonecraft calls for physical, mental and moral fitness and what today we call resilience. She despises "the fumes of vanity" – false frailty or self-imposed weakness and "spaniel-like" docility – in which women are valued only for their feelings and emotions and not their reason and intellect:

"It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meanness, cares, and sorrows, into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion, that they are created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain must be obtained by their charms and weakness ... Fragile in every sense of the word, they are obliged to look up to man for every comfort. In the most trifling danger they cling to their support, with parasitical tenacity ... From what? perhaps the frown of an old cow, or the jump of a mouse ...I am fully persuaded that we should hear of none of these infantine airs, if girls were allowed to take sufficient exercise, and not confined in close rooms till their muscles are relaxed, and their powers of digestion destroyed. To carry the mark still further, if girls, instead of being cherished, perhaps, created, were treated in the same manner as cowardice in boys, we should quickly see women with more dignified aspects. It is true, they could not then with equal propriety be termed the sweet flowers that smile in the walk of man; but they would be more respectable members of society, and discharge the important duties of life by the light of their own reason."

Wollstonecraft offers revolutionary views about sex and gender, education and equality, marriage and motherhood, and virtue and authority. Her intellect and arguments trump chauvinists like Edmund Burke, Jean-Jacque Rousseau and Louis XIV.

Founder George Washington

However, on several occasions she praises General/President George Washington, using him as an example of courage, good planning, benevolent leadership and, above all, modesty as commander in chief and leader of a nation.

"A modest man often conceives a great plan, and tenaciously adheres to it, conscious of his own strength, till success gives it a sanction that determines its character ... George Washington when he accepted of the command of the American forces ... has always been characterized as a modest man; but had he been merely humble, he would probably have shrunk back irresolute, afraid of trusting to himself the direction of an enterprise, on which so much depended."

She commends him for standing down after his term of presidency and returning to his farm at Mount Vernon, refusing calls to become a monarch in the New World.

Praising peace and cooperation, Wollstonecraft says "defensive war" is "the only justifiable war." Interestingly, she speaks out against having a "standing army," though she seems to support the concept of an educated militia. "A standing army, for instance, is incompatible with freedom; because subordination and rigour are the very sinews of military discipline," she writes. She could not, perhaps, imagine an all-volunteer military.

"Standing armies can never consist of resolute robust men; they may be well-disciplined machines, but they will seldom contain men under the influence of strong passions, or with very vigorous faculties ... Like the 'fair sex,' the business of their lives is gallantry; they were taught to please, and they only live to please."

English navy rum rations

The irony of her stereotyping while trying to enlighten can make the reader wince, but perhaps it's forgivable when we consider her times and experiences. Read what she says about British sailors and soldiers circa 1790s:

"Sailors, the naval gentlemen, come under the same description, only their vices assume a different and a grosser cast. They are more positively indolent, when not discharging the ceremonials of their station; whilst the insignificant fluttering of soldiers may be termed active idleness. More confined to the society of men, the former acquire a fondness for humour and mischievous tricks; whilst the latter, mixing frequently with well-bred women, catch a sentimental cant. But mind is equally out of the question, whether they indulge the horse-laugh, or polite simper."

Wollstonecraft's "Vindication" is filled with memorable quotes on education, equality, reason and the nature of motherhood.

Wollstonecraft Quotes

• "Let the honest heart show itself, and reason teach passion to submit to necessity; or, let the dignified pursuit of virtue and knowledge raise the mind above those emotions which rather embitter than sweeten the cup of life, when they are not restrained within due bounds."

• "Would ye, O my sisters, really possess modesty, ye must remember that the possession of virtue, of any denomination, is incompatible with ignorance and vanity."

• "Consequently the perfection of our nature and capability of happiness must be estimated by the degree of reason, virtue, and knowledge, that distinguish the individual, and direct the laws which bind society: and that from the exercise of reason, knowledge and virtue naturally flow, is equally undeniable, if mankind be viewed collectively."

• "It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world!"

• "But moss-covered opinions assume the disproportioned form of prejudices when they are indolently adopted only because age has given them a venerable aspect, though the reason on which they were built ceases to be a reason, or cannot be traced.

• "...Sluggish reason, which supinely takes opinions on trust, and obstinately supports them to spare itself the labour of thinking."

• "I hope I shall not be misunderstood when I say, that will not have this condensing energy, unless it be founded on reason. If it be merely the refuge of weakness or wild fanaticism, and not a governing principle of conduct, drawn from self-knowledge, and a rational opinion respecting the attributes of God, what can it be expected to produce?"

• "The education which women now receive scarcely deserves the name."

• "History, philosophy and classical languages are considered too rigourous for minds born uniformly unequal to the task."

• "Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but as blind obedience is ever sought for by power tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavour to keep woman in the dark, because the former only want slaves, and the latter a plaything."

• "Rights and duties are inseparable."

• "Men are certainly more under the influence of their appetites than women; and their appetites are more depraved by unbridled indulgence and the fastidious contrivances of satiety."

• "But, in proportion as this regard for the reputation of chastity is prized by women, it is despised by men; and the two extremes are equally destructive to morality."

• "Women as well as men ought to have the common appetites and passions of their nature; they are only brutal when unchecked by reason..."

• "The two sexes mutually corrupt and improve each other."

• "How can women be just, or generous, when they are slaves of injustice."

• "Women might certainly study the art of healing and be physicians as well as nurses!"

• "Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices, which they have imbibed, they can scarcely trace how, rather than to root them out."

• "Ignorance is a frail base for virtue."

• "To be a good mother, a woman must have sense, and that independence of mind which few women possess who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands."

• "It is a trite, yet a true remark, that we never do anything well, unless we love it for its own sake."

Memorable Prose

Wollstonecraft

Chapter 9, which is titled "Of the Pernicious Effects which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society," begins with jaw-dropping prose:

"From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind. For it is in the most polished society that noisome reptiles and venomous serpents lurk under the rank herbage; and there is voluptuousness pampered by the still sultry air, which relaxes every good disposition before it ripens into virtue. 

One class presses on another, for all are aiming to procure respect on account of their property; and property once gained will procure the respect due only to talents and virtue. Men neglect the duties incumbent on man, yet are treated like demi-gods. Religion is also separated from morality by a ceremonial veil, yet men wonder that the world is almost, literally speaking, a den of sharpers or oppressors. 

There is a homely proverb, which speaks a shrewd truth, that whoever the devil finds idle he will employ. And what but habitual idleness can hereditary wealth and title produce? For man is so constituted that he can only attain a proper use of his faculties by exercising them, and will not exercise them unless necessity of some kind first set the wheels in motion. Virtue likewise can only be acquired by the discharge of relative duties; but the importance of these sacred duties will scarcely be felt by the being who is cajoled out of his humanity by the flattery of sycophants. There must be more equality established in society, or morality will never gain ground, and this virtuous equality will not rest firmly even when founded on a rock, if one-half of mankind be chained to its bottom by fate, for they will be continually undermining it through ignorance or pride."

This is another great read for Women's History Month and for these days and weeks of staying home – reading and learning.


Sailors assigned to Patrol Squadron (VP) 4, in Sigonella, Sicily, pose for a photo prior to an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission over the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, March 20, 2020. All crew positions on the aircraft were occupied by female aviators in homage to women’s history month. (MC2 Juan Sua)

(For excerpts in this blogpost, in most cases I kept with the British spelling and punctuation as in the original.)

'Deadliest Plague in History'

Review by Bill Doughty

In the first week of February, we published a review of John M. Barry's "The Great Influenza." Barry shows how fear became terror, how healthcare workers were affected, and how the Navy was center-stage as the disease changed the course of the world 100 years ago. Today the Navy is once again facing and helping defend against a global pandemic.

HN K. Kavanagh sanitizes medical equipment aboard USNS Mercy March 24. (MC2 R.Breeden)

In this follow-up Great Influenza blogpost, we offer some more important points from Barry's now-classic report.

His book has special resonance today in the wake of the current COVID-19 pandemic, where New York is again an epicenter. 

One hundred years ago, "New York City was panicking, terrified," Barry writes, after a politically appointed health commissioner named Royal Copeland – "a man with no belief in modern scientific medicine and whose ambitions were not in public health" – failed to respond or take the initial outbreak seriously, calling for a quarantine only after it was too late.

"There were literally hundreds of thousands of people sick simultaneously, many of them desperately sick. The death toll ultimately reached thirty-three thousand for New York City alone, and that understated the number considerably since statisticians later arbitrarily stopped counting people as victims of the epidemic even though people were still dying of the disease at epidemic rates – still dying months later at rates higher than anywhere else in the country. It was impossible to get a doctor, and perhaps more impossible to get a nurse."

Barry relates how nationwide "physicians attempted everything – everything – to save lives." The desperate attempts to find a cure led them to try "atropine, digitalis, strychnine, and epinephrine as stimulants."

"Physicians injected people with typhoid vaccine, thinking – or simply hoping – it might somehow boost the immune system in general even though the specificity of the immune response was well understood... Quinine worked on one disease: malaria. Many physicians gave it for influenza with no better reasoning than desperation... One physician gave hydrogen peroxide intravenously to twenty-five patients in severe pulmonary distress, believing that it would get oxygen into the blood. Thirteen recovered; twelve died. This physician, too, claimed success."

Barry writes, "No medicine and none of the vaccines developed than could prevent influenza. The masks worn by millions were useless as designed and could not prevent influenza. Only preventing exposure to the virus could." Quarantine, isolation and what we now call social distancing was the only way to slow the scourge.

Those areas that acted swiftly had less of an adverse impact. Meanwhile, Navy scientists played a key role in searching for a pathogen, vaccine and cure.

As a result of the 1918 pandemic and other smaller outbreaks – including H7N7 and SARS – over the past 25 years, the World Health Organization advised all nations to be watchful, prepared, staged and ready to respond to another pandemic.

Barry says there are two main lessons to learn: "The first involves threat assessment, planning, and allocating resources." "A centralized system should exist to allocate all resources," he writes. 

"But there is another lesson from 1918 that is clear. It is also less tangible. It involves fear and the media and the way authorities deal with the public."

In other words, tell the truth. The media and public officials made the problem worse when they downplayed the realities of the epidemic. "In 1918, the lies of officials and of the press never allowed the terror to condense into the concrete. The public could trust nothing and so they knew nothing."

"So the final lesson, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that those who occupy positions of authority must lessen the panic that can alienate all within a society. Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that. Those in authority must retain the public's trust. They way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one."

Well-written and fast-paced, this is a must-read now for everyone. For a full review of "The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History" – including the key role the Navy played during and after the pandemic – visit the Navy Reads review of February 6, 2020. The review was written before the current novel coronavirus strain, originating in Wuhan, China, was given a proper name: COVID-19.

In one of several appearances over the years on C-SPAN, Barry gave a keynote address to a Pandemic Preparedness and Response forum on November 13, 2017. The Johns Hopkins meeting was attended by leading epidemiologists, other scientists and health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Barry focused his remarks on the imperative for honesty and trust in a crisis, saying he despises the term "risk communication" because "it implies managing the truth, and I don't think you manage the truth; I think you tell the truth."

He concludes, "Planning does not equal preparation. I think maybe the biggest challenge to the public health community is to get political leaders to make rational decisions in crisis situations."

The Navy hospital ship USNS Mercy deployed to Los Angeles this week. USNS Comfort is scheduled to deploy to New York in the weeks ahead.

SAN DIEGO (March 23, 2020) -- Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH 19) navigates the San Diego channel March 23. Mercy deployed in support of the nation’s COVID-19 response efforts, and will serve as a referral hospital for non-COVID-19 patients currently admitted to shore-based hospitals. This allows shore base hospitals to focus their efforts on COVID-19 cases. One of the Department of Defense’s missions is Defense Support of Civil Authorities. DOD is supporting the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the lead federal agency, as well as state, local and public health authorities in helping protect the health and safety of the American people. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Lasheba James/Released)

The Lies of Totalitarianism

Review by Bill Doughty–

"To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity."

So writes Hannah Arendt, gifted thinker and historian in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (Schoken Books, Random House, 1948, 1957; renewed 1976). Her work is vital to anyone interested in understanding the Holocaust or the rise of Fascism.

Leo Hymas speaks about his personal experiences to a group of Soldiers about World War II and the Holocaust at French Theater on Joint Base Lewis-McChord, WA., April 29, 2014 to educate the JBLM community of the history and significance of the Holocaust. (Photo by Sgt. Jasmine Higgins/Released)

Totalitarian leaders use fear, existential threats, and targeting of "the other" – people perceived to have no rights. Most of all, dictators or would-be dictators tell lies.

Hitler and Stalin

Profiling the Nazis under Adolf Hitler and Bolsheviks under Josef Stalin, Arendt examines the characteristics, effects and results of dictatorship. She also helps answer how and why people were willing to believe their supreme leaders' lies.

"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."

Emaciated prisoners at the Ebensee camp.

Regarding the belief in unbelievable lies and falsehoods, Arendt writes, "Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity." People had to believe lies and dehumanize in order justify murdering millions of other people during the Holocaust.

Arendt explains how narcissistic autocrats are drawn to rituals and symbols. Marches, military parades and self-adulating shows of idolatry reinforce the propaganda.

She compares Nazi and Bolshevik mass propaganda. Both heavily depended on conspiracy theories, either age-old themes (such as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" forgery and anti-semitism) or invented fears (countless sinister imperialist or internal conspiracies).

"The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the masses' inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important only because it convinces them of consistency in time."

Bergen-Belsen camp, liberated April 15, 1945.

"Repetition ... is important" in propaganda and mind control. Arendt, of course, writes in a time before the internet, social media and smart phones. In 2020, distorted truths and outright lies can be repeated and shared in ways unthinkable in the 1940s and 50s.

The Leader establishes a "spell of infallibility" and thrives in chaos. "The totalitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from reaching the point where a new way of life could develop," Arendt writes. Followers must have contempt for the nonbelievers and outsiders. 

"The result of this system is that the gullibility of sympathizers makes lies credible to the outside world, while at the same time the graduated cynicism of membership and elite formations eliminates the danger that the Leader will ever be forced by the weight of his own propaganda to make good his own statements and feigned respectability. It has been one of the chief handicaps of the outside world in dealing with totalitarian systems that it ignored this system and therefore trusted that, on one hand, the very enormity of totalitarian lies would be their undoing and that, on the other, it would be possible to take the Leader at his word and force him, regardless of his original intentions, to make it good. The totalitarian system, unfortunately, is foolproof against such normal consequences; its ingeniousness rests precisely on the elimination of that reality which either unmasks the liar or forces him to live up to his pretense."

Arendt in 1924

"Totalitarianism in power," Arendt writes, "uses the state as its outward façade, to represent the country in the nontotalitarian world." Ignoring or appeasing dictators may not work. They often will find ways to manipulate the system to remain in power.

Imperialism and Role of Racism

"Origins" is presented in three parts: Anti-Semitism, Imperialism and Totalitarianism. Part II, Imperialism, is the longest section and examines the "brutality and megalomania" of the ideology that brought about the World Wars. In words that resonate today in light of Putin's revanchism toward Crimea and Ukraine, we read: "The initiative for continental expansion in close geographic continuity no longer comes from Central and Eastern Europe [i.e. Nazi Germany] but is exclusively located in Russia."

Imperialism, Arendt shows, was supported by the right and the left, often encouraged by the workers who saw economic benefits. "In Germany, the liberals (and not the Conservative Party) were the actual promoters of that famous naval policy which contributed so heavily to the outbreak of the first World War." The Socialist Party also "repeatedly voted" to obligate funds to build the German navy after 1906.

The British trawler Rudyard Kipling, launched in 1920, was sunk by a German U-boat in 1939.

She calls author Rudyard Kipling "the author of imperialist legend" for the British Empire, establishing a "foundation legend" based on the sea, quoting him from "The First Sailor" (Humorous Tales, 1871). Arendt writes:

"The foundation legend, as Kipling tells it, starts from the fundamental reality of the people of the British Isles. Surrounded by the sea, they need and win the help of the three elements of Water, Wind, and Sun through the invention of the Ship. The ship made the always dangerous alliance with the elements possible and made the Englishman master of the world. 'You'll win the world without anyone knowing how you did it: and you'll carry the world on your backs without anyone seeing how you did it. But neither you nor your sons will get anything out of that little job except Four gifts – one for the Sea, one for the Wind, one for the Sun and one for the Ship that carries you ... For, winning the world, and keeping the world, and carrying the world on their backs – on land, or on the sea, or in the air – your sons will always have the Four Gifts. Long-headed and slow-spoken and heavy – damned heavy – in the hand, will they be; and always a little bit to windward of every enemy – that they may be a safeguard to all who pass on the seas on their lawful occasions.'"

This passage sums up, as Arendt recognizes, the so-called "white man's burden" – as well as, it could be argued, "manifest destiny" exceptionalism and white supremacist racism.

Early European colonists in Africa captured slaves, often pitting tribes against each other.

Africa was exploited by colonialists and imperialists in the centuries leading up to the 19th century. Seafaring nations, especially Britain, established "maritime and trade stations" to promote commercial exchange. Commerce included African slaves. Arendt presents an eye-opening discussion about South Africa's Boers, who were descended from Dutch settlers, and how they acted out of fear, exterminated tribes and then accepted another banality of evil: apartheid.

What fuels imperialism? "Racism is the main ideological weapon of imperialistic politics," Arendt contends, Russians who consider themselves Slavs, Germans who think they are superior Aryans.

Diversity in a nation is shown as a bulwark and strength. "Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization."

Power Lessons for 2020

From its 600 pages, packed with history and philosophy, it would be impossible to summarize all of Arendt's points in this blog. But her points seem as fresh and relevant in 2020 as they did 70 years ago, even as she admits, "No matter how much we may be unable of learning from the past, it will not enable us to know the future."

Hobbes's "Leviathan"

Through Arendt we discover lessons from history that can can apply to current events: Corruption in the Soviet Union but supposedly not in Communist China, the Dreyfus Affair, "Secret Judah" and "Secret Rome," and the roles of some Catholics (Pius XII and "The Deputy") and Protestants (Martin Niemöller) in dealing with the Nazis.

Arendt gives an extended interpretation of mid-17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes and his treatise on social contracts in a civil society, "Leviathan." She writes, "Power, according to Hobbes, is the accumulated control that permits the individual to fix prices and regulate supply and demand in such a way that they contribute to his own advantage." A "never-ending accumulation of power necessary for a never-ending accumulation of capital ... foreshadowed the rise of imperialism."

"Origin" lays out how imperialism grew out of colonialism. Arendt explains Soviet goals and seems to predict Russian aggression in Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine, from a perspective more than half a century ago. "The initiative for continental expansion in close geographic continuity no longer comes from Central and Eastern Europe but is exclusively Russian," She writes. "No one justifies expansion any longer by 'the white man's burden ...; instead we hear of 'commitments' to client states, of the responsibilities of power, and of solidarity with revolutionary national liberation movements.'"

A hopeful sign comes in a chapter called "A Classless Society": "Nothing is more characteristic of the totalitarian movements in general and of the quality of fame of their leaders in particular than the startling swiftness with which they are forgotten and the startling ease with which they can be replaced."

Laced throughout this indispensable history of totalitarianism is an unspoken warning, though. Beware the lies, especially the big lies. Demand clear, consistent, trusted messaging and honesty from leaders. Most of all, recognize the insanity.

U.S. Navy Sailors assigned to the guided-missile destroyer USS Jason Dunham (DDG 109) tour the Haifa Holocaust Museum as part of a community relations event during a scheduled port visit to Haifa, Israel, June 22, 2018. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Jonathan Clay/Released)

Beware Government by Fear, Decree

Review by Bill Doughty–

Soldiers of the U.S. Army's 9th Armored Division reach Remagen Bridge in early March 1945.

There is a reason books about fascism, imperialism and authoritarianism refer to historian Hannah Arendt.

Her "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (Schoken Books, Random House, 1948, 1957; renewed 1976) is the motherlode of warnings about the growth and acceptance of such movements and leaders. The book is a call for vigilance and action and a rejection of apathy.

Arendt shows how dictators can rise from catastrophes and destruction. She explains how an "open disregard for law and legal institutions and ideological justification of lawlessness" allow totalitarianism to flourish. And she warns about the autocratic tendency to destroy norms, spread lies, and rule by decree.

Government of, by and for the people is the opposite of government by dictate or bureaucracy under the ultimate control of an all-powerful "Leader" (using Arendt's capital L). The megalomaniacal autocrat ignores controls within the government and creates a "secret society in broad daylight."

Hitler's 1939 Action T4 justified killing disabled children and adults. 

"Legally, government by bureaucracy is government by decree, and this means that power, which in constitutional government only enforces the law, becomes the direct source of all legislation," according to Arendt. 

The bureaucrat, who by merely administering decrees has the illusion of constant action, feels tremendously superior to these 'impractical' people who are forever entangled in 'legal niceties' and therefore stay outside the sphere of power which to him is the source of everything."

"Arbitrary power, unrestricted by law, wielded in the interest of the ruler and hostile to the interests of the governed, on one hand, fear as the principle of action, namely fear of the people by the ruler and fear of the ruler by the people, on the other – these have been the hallmarks of tyranny..."

The dictator/leader through his appointed chief law enforcement officer (a.k.a. attorney general) becomes the ultimate administrator of the law:

"The administrator considers the law to be powerless because it is by definition separated from its application. The decree, on the other hand, does not exist at all except if and when it is applied; it needs no justification except applicability. It is true that decrees are used by all governments in times of emergency, but then the emergency itself is a clear justification and automatic limitation. In governments by bureaucracy decrees appear in their naked purity as though they were no longer issued by powerful men, but were the incarnation of power itself and the administrator only its accidental agent. There are no general principles which simple reason can understand behind the decree, but ever-changing circumstances which only an expert can know in detail. People ruled by decree never know what rules them because of the impossibility of understanding decrees in themselves and the carefully organized ignorance of specific circumstances and their practical significance in which all administrators keep their subjects."

"The Leader's absolute monopoly of power and authority is most conspicuous in the relationship between him and his chief of police (Himmler in Nazi Germany), who in totalitarian country occupies the most powerful public position," Arendt writes. Even if the chief law enforcement officer does not have absolute executive power, "this does not prevent (him) from organizing his enormous apparatus in accordance with totalitarian power principles."

Then the good people in government are forced to choose: either stay and try to be an influence for what is right or leave and escape the fear and terror. But a narcissistic autocrat often does not give them a choice. Paranoid and deranged, he purges those who are opposed to the rule of law. He never accepts blame or responsibility for failure: "If he wants to correct his own errors, he must liquidate those who carried them out," Arendt writes.

"The humiliation implicit in owing a job to the unjust elimination of one's predecessor has the same demoralizing effect that the elimination of the Jews had upon the German professions: it makes every jobholder a conscious accomplice in the crimes of the government, their beneficiary whether he likes it or not, with the result that the more sensitive the humiliated individual happens to be, the more ardently he will defend the regime. In other words, this system is the logical outgrowth of the Leader principle in its full implications and the best possible guarantee for loyalty, in that it makes every new generation depend for its livelihood on the current political line of the Leader which started the job-creating purge."

Nazis – "living corpses" – at Christmas, date unknown.

As members of the leader's inner circle carry out the Leader's decrees their identity and morality are killed off and they become "living corpses," she says. "The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the judicial person in man." The autocrat rules with a vulgar and demoralizing destruction of norms.

Vulgarity replaces "generally accepted intellectual, cultural and moral standards" in the republic. "Vulgarity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories carried with it a frank admission of the worst and a disregard for all pretenses which were easily mistaken for courage and a new style of life," Arendt writes.

Corruption becomes the modus operandi. It was a problem in anti-Semitic France  in the late 1800s, when the bureaucracy "gained control of public funds and how the Budget Commission was governed entirely by public interests." And, "Corruption, the curse of the Russian administration from the beginning, was also present during the last years of the Nazi regime..."

Weaponizing their corruption, dictators target media, intellectuals and free-thinking artists and creators.

"Wherever totalitarian movements seized power, this whole group of sympathizers was shaken off even before the regimes proceeded toward their greatest crimes. Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob, and both are more dangerous than mere political opposition. The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty."

After the Leader eliminates nonbelievers, naysayers, whistleblowers and independent voices in his inner circle, he is then surrounded by sycophants who can reinforce his belief in his own lies. The authoritarian autocrat believes in his own omnipotence. Hitler said he was "irreplaceable" and that "the destiny of the Reich depends on me alone."



The goal is to remove all independence of thought, courage of conscience, and creativity of the individual. The same elimination of free thought and action happened purposefully in the camps as well.

In Germany, concentration and extermination camps were "meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing," according to Arendt. "Terror enforces oblivion."

Cries and resignation in Nazi Germany.

Hitler initiated a campaign of fear and warlike terror in the name of Germany. His initiative was a means to stabilize and feed the economy – "'guns and butter' actually meant 'butter through guns.'" Arendt notes, "One may even surmise that one of Hitler's reasons for provoking this war was that it enabled him to accelerate the development in a manner that would have been unthinkable in peacetime."

Authoritarian leaders collude and corrupt to investigate and denounce political opponents. They get rid of possible successors or anyone who dares question their decrees, directives and lawless orders.

"Deadly danger to any civilization is no longer likely to come from without," Arendt warns. The emergence of totalitarian governments is a phenomenon within, not outside, our civilization. The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are conditions of savages."

This is one of at least two Navy Reads reviews of the Arendt's monumental work on the forensics of totalitarianism, a highly recommended book for anyone involved in defending democracy and the Constitution.

This is also a good selection for Women's History Month in March. Hannah Arendt, who immigrated to the United States and became an American citizen in 1950, is widely considered one of the great philosophers and political thinkers of the 20th century.

One hundred years ago: Arendt in 1920

In this edition of "Origins," Samantha Power provides the book's introduction. "In contemporary debates over ethnic conflict, genocide, international rights, sovereignty and terrorism, (Arendt's) writings have retained a profound pertinence that augurs well for her permanent place among the masters," Power writes. "She understood that barbarous regimes could not come into being overnight."

Power writes of militant Islam including the attacks of 9/11, genocide in in Rwanda, Mao's so-called "Great Leap Forward," Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge terror in Cambodia, and ethnic cleansing for a "Greater Serbia" in the Balkans. She highlights "Arendt's prophetic skepticism about the enforceability of international human rights," and says hope rests with individual activists, organizers and journalists, though that may be a challenge.

"In some countries state control is so fierce that independent voices are muzzled and marginalized, power and wealth are concentrated among elites, and injustice rules. In others, war or occupation have brought such ruin and humiliation that civil society cannot flower and no amount of organizing can restore living standards or human dignity. It is from some of these countries that contemporary terrorist threats hail, and it is here that 'Origins' offers further wisdom for today's dark times – wisdom that we ignore at our peril."

Samantha Power is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, political thinker and diplomat who served as the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. Hers is a call for collaboration, cooperation and action instead of fear and apathy.

Navy Veteran and former Secretary of State John Kerry with then United States Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, Oct. 2, 2015.

'Then They Came for Me'

Review by Bill Doughty

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

 — Martin Niemöller

How does an individual confront rising authoritarianism and the threat of totalitarianism?

In his great historical biography, "Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor Who Defied the Nazis" (Basic Books, Hachette Book Group, 2018), Matthew D. Hockenos shows the paradox and irony of Niemöller – his life and times – as a man who dealt with the rise and ruthlessness of Adolph Hitler.

Hockenos presents a fascinating biography of Niemöller as patriotic warfighter, Christian dissident and (eventually) reluctant pacifist. The book also is a history of anti-Semitism and Germany's participation as an aggressor in two World Wars.

Niemöller was born to follow in his father's footsteps as a Lutheran Church leader – but he had an early childhood love of the sea. As a boy he wore a sailor suit every Sunday and pretended to be a sailor in the kaiser's navy.

Tirpitz

In "Then They Came for Me," readers jump right into the naval arms race of the late 1800s that eventually propelled the world into the First World War. Kaiser Wilhelm and his chief of staff of the naval executive command, Alfred von Tirpitz, were impressed with the strategies of Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan. They also embraced the imperialism and militarism of their time with rising new technologies and war-making mechanized capabilities.

"The maritime expansion from the 1890s to 1914 electrified the German middle class, which took great pleasure in the spectacles of modern shipbuilding, launches of new warships, and ceremonial fleet reviews presided over by the kaiser. The race to build more and better ships, the cult of the uniform, and the naval mania in the popular media bolstered their patriotism. Tirpitz's Naval Office carried out its own public relations campaign aimed at influencing popular opinion and the legislative process. Active and retired officers, writers, and friendly academics – so-called fleet professors (Flottenprofessoren) – disseminated naval propaganda through books, brochures, newspaper articles, and lectures. A young Martin Niemöller gobbled it all up."

Niemöller

Among the new technologies: giant warships and submarines.

"By the time Niemöller joined the navy, the arms race was in full swing. The British had upped the ante in 1905 with the construction of the 17,900-ton Dreadnought. Mounted with ten huge cannons, the ship was nonetheless capable of high speed – twenty-one knots – thanks to its state-of-the-art turbine. Kaiser Wilhelm and Admiral Tirpitz responded with rapid construction of their own 'dreadnoughts' and increasingly efficient U-boats (Unterseeboot, or undersea boat)."

In a whites-only, male-only navy officer corps that excluded social democrats, trade unionists and Jews, Niemöller became a U-boat officer and eventually U-boat commander.

Hockenos reports on the devastation German submarines wrought to ships, including civilian ocean liners. Niemöller supported unrestricted submarine warfare even as U-boats sank the Lusitania and Arabic, murdering 2,000 people, including 131 Americans.

Niemöller served aboard U73, U39 and U151; he eventually had command of U151.

HMS in Quebec in 1908, eight years before being sunk by a mine from Niemöller's U-boat U73.

Niemöller called his service aboard the mine-laying submarine U73, in which he sank six British warships, including the HMS Russell, during "our Christian cruise." He believed in "Prussian militarism and Protestant nationalism," Hockenos writes, and he fought fervently against separation of church and state. 

As with most German Christians at the time, he had a revulsion for the Jewish religion, which was part of a 2,000 year heritage of anti-Semitism in Europe. Ironically, the German Christians thought they, not the Jews, were God's chosen people: "Gott mit uns" – God is with us.

Hockenos shows shipboard hardships and domestic disunity at the end of the war as Germany neared defeat. Only a revolt of enlisted sailors prevented a last-minute suicide mission by the navy. In the hastily achieved Treaty of Versailles (in which the President Wilson was sick due to the influenza pandemic of 1918), Germany lost "80 percent of its naval fleet, all of its colonies, and, as far as the people were concerned, all of its dignity."

Karl Barth and Martin Niemöller.

Niemöller began his Lutheran religious studies at the University of Münster one hundred years ago – in January, 1920.

In their nation's defeat, most Germans blamed the Jews. Church leaders, including Niemöller, vilified the Jews for crucifying Christ. The Church in Germany split between the conservative nationalists who supported Hitler and the progressive independents like Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and, to a lesser degree, Niemöller.

With Barth, Niemöller tried to keep church autonomy, but still wanted to prove to the Nazis, including the minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, that he was a loyal nationalist. In the mid-1930s he wrote a "wildly popular" autobiography, "From U-Boat to Pulpit."

"Niemöller's Prussian militarism and Protestant nationalism, proudly on display throughout the book, were the very principles that Hitler exploited in his rise to power. That Niemöller didn't play down these sentiments after a year and a half of Nazi terror and thuggery says a great deal about his political sympathies lay in 1934. Just a month before Niemöller wrote his book, Hitler ordered the SS to murder nearly two hundred leading SA (aka brownshirt) officials and conservative politicians he feared were undermining his authority."

Goebbels

The Nazis arrested Niemöller several times and finally put him on trial for courageously speaking out for church autonomy; the Nazis ordered all churches to fly German national flags and swastika banners. They demanded loyalty and support to the state. 

During the trial, Nazis attempted to influence the Ministry of Justice – pressuring for no witnesses and criticizing the way the trial was conducted. When Goebbels didn't like the results of the court he publicly berated the jurists, "calling them derogatory names and threatening to put them before a firing squad once the trial was over."

Goebbels's diary entry reads like a modern-day angry tweet. Goebbels wrote: "The 'Holy' pastor become insolent and the court warmly encourages him. A real Scandal!"

After the trial resulted in what was in effect an acquittal, Niemöller was still not set free. Instead he was made a personal "prisoner of Hitler" and eventually sent to Dachau Concentration Camp. He would not return home for nearly eight years.

Dachau Nazi concentration camp.

With the verdict and imprisonment Niemöller became a martyr and gained international fame. In Brooklyn, Reverend John Paul Jones of Union Church performed a reenactment of Niemöller's imprisonment, including with actors in Gestapo uniforms. Jones then preached his sermon behind what looked like a prison door and barred window.

Back in Germany, In the wake of a failed assassination attempt, Hitler ordered the killing of 11,000 dissidents he called "enemies of the state." Among those murdered was Bonhoeffer. Niemöller barely escaped; he made his way to Italy in the closing days of the war.

The imprisonment opened Niemöller's mind, Hockenos says, to a more ecumenical, universal and united Protestantism. Still, he was drawn to nationalism and authoritarianism. "Frequent rants against the U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War" brought condemnation from Gen. Lucius Clay, Commander in Chief of U.S. Forces Europe.

But, Niemöller's experience in prison and some deep post-war reflection also led him gradually toward pacifism. He saw Gandhi as a prophet. Though he supported the "police action" in Korea in the 1950s, he was a strong opponent of the Vietnam War a decade later, even traveling there twice during the war and in speaking out against American bombing campaigns and escalation.

As World Church Council President, Niemöller recorded "Help Vietnam."

Regarding Vietnam, he warned that the war "will sow hatred and enmity toward Americans for years to come." He condemned the killing of innocent people, including children. He became friends with Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Schweitzer and Linus Pauling – each recipients of Nobel Peace Prizes.

Reflecting the layers of paradox and irony in Niemöller's life, he became closer to Germany's former enemy, Russia, attracted to aspects of Soviet Communism. He even accepted the Lenin Prize after a visit to Hanoi in 1967.

Hockenos writes, "(H)is desire to bridge East and West, North and South, through dialogue and mutual trust seems to have blinded him to the harsh realities and criminal nature of Communism – the material deprivations, the lack of freedom and due process, and the mass incarceration and executions."

Pope Pius XII

In later life, after reflecting on Protestants' role – as well as Pope Pius XII's reported appeasement of Fascism and Nazism – Niemöller became Germany's face of contrition, humility and repentance to the world. (Of note, NPR reports today that the Vatican opened Pope Pius XII's archives "after decades of pressure from historians and Jewish groups" so scholars can evaluate the pontiff's role during World War II.)

Hockenos reveals a big twist in the pastor's personal life an interesting connection between his family and the Weisbaden U.S. Air Force Hospital and local Department of Defense Dependents School. Stepson U. Marcus Niemöller attended school there in the 1970s.

Martin Niemöller died 36 years ago: March 6, 1984.

"Then They Came for Me" provides an inspiring profile of a man who had the courage to live by his convictions and yet examine his beliefs as "an ordinary, and ordinarily flawed, human being." It shows an individual's capacity to evolve.

"But it is the imperfection of Niemöller's moral compass that makes him all the more relevant today. This middle-class, conservative Protestant, who harbored ingrained prejudices against those not like him, did something excruciatingly difficult for someone of his background: he changed his mind."

Hockenos concludes, "When the facts indicted that he had taken the wrong path, the former U-boat pilot changed course, albeit grudgingly and often very slowly."

This is a remarkable and worthwhile book for readers interested in the World Wars, the role of religion in politics, and how individuals react in the rise of totalitarianism.

The Colorado National Guard hosts a "Season of Light" ceremony at the Joint Force Hq., Centennial, Co., Dec. 19, 2019. Special guest speaker Jack Adler, a Holocaust survivor, spoke about the history of anti-Semitism and living a life free from hate. On April 29, 1945 soldiers of the 157th Infantry helped liberate Dachau concentration camp. (Photo by Maj. Darin Overstreet)

Video of survivor Jack Adler's talk is available at https://youtu.be/zi5COUaanHQ.