112 - The Doomsday Clock Approaches Midnight: How Can We Reclaim the Moral Center?
I wish I knew how that could be accomplished, here at home and across the planet. Better yet, I wish our gifted leaders could beat a path back to the “Have you no decency, sir, at long last?” cry of Army Counsel Joseph Welch that slowed Senator Joseph McCarthy’s conspiracist lies and red-baiting in 1954 or Maine’s Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith calling out McCarthy in 1950 by issuing a “Declaration of Conscience.” She called McCarthy’s insidious utterances “irresponsible words of bitterness and selfish political opportunism” that were causing “a serious national condition” of “fear and frustration that could result in national suicide.”
She continued in words timely and relevant now: “It is high time that we remembered that we have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution” and that a “Republican regime embracing a philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would [be] disastrous to the nation.” She did not condone Republicans riding to victory on “the Four Horsemen of Calumny – fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear.” She ended (relevant now, too) with “I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.” (For more on Smith’s cri de Coeur, see #77 “Speaking Truth to Power: An Exhortation of Conscience on Bastille Day, July 14. For Welch, see #37, “Have You No Shame? The Big Lie and More Lies,” April 26.)
No Republican now seems able, or dares to speak out against the very deceitful actions and nefarious untruths that both Smith and Welch excoriated decades ago.
Nor, in Russia, no Andrei Sakharov dares oppose Putin’s ruinous depredations from within or without. Only Alexei Navalny, from the depths of a Siberian Gulag manages –somehow—to remind the world what an unprincipled killer Putin remains as a wannabe latter day Stalin.
Memorial, the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize organization, that exists to remind today’s Russians of the war crimes committed by Stalin and the Soviet era, is being shuttered by Putin for fear of its exposure of his outrageous offenses against humanity. “If you cover up these crimes, you become an accomplice to them,” Memorial’s chair said this weekend. “Without realizing it, and distancing yourself from it, it is impossible to build any future.”
Russians are indeed being jailed right and left today for “discrediting” Russia’s military and objecting to the false invasion of Ukraine. The parallels between the Stalinist/Soviet era and today are chilling. “This is really becoming similar to Soviet times, and in some respects it is worse,” the chair reported. “There was less aggression in propaganda during the Soviet era. The fact that institutions like Russia’s internet regulator and the Ministry of Justice have been endowed with the broadest extrajudicial powers, reproduces one of the most dangerous phenomena of the Stalin era.”
These morbid musings arise in the aftermath of the invasion of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s house in San Francisco and the physical sufferings of 82-year old Paul Pelosi, all caused directly by a hate-spewing conspiracy believer and, indirectly, by the hateful and prevarication-filled climate that Trump has unleashed on unsuspecting Americans and that more and more ambitious “ass-kissing” (Trump’s words) Republican opportunists are perpetuating. Note that neither Trump nor the Republican governor of Virginia voiced their empathy for battered Paul Pelosi or sent genuine wishes of sympathy to his tough wife, our third in line for the presidency. And aberrant Elon Musk tweeted a false, dis-informing web account!
These morbid musings also flow from Putin’s typically pernicious decision to cut off grain shipments from Odesa and other Ukrainian ports. Nearly 8 million tons of wheat and barley have so far managed to leave Ukraine, navigate the Russian-patrolled Black Sea, and transit the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles en route to ports both in Europe and in Africa. But there are more than 12 additional tons waiting to be shipped, and further supplies for the starving about to be harvested.
As I wrote just the other day, fully 11 million poor persons (including 6 million children) are already hungering in the Horn of Africa. Possibly another 11 million are food short elsewhere on the continent, including Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco. Putin’s refusal to continue the UN-brokered and Turkish-facilitated exports of foodstuffs from Ukraine (and Russia) obviously jeopardizes the futures of many millions who are neither responsible for nor in any manner involved in the existential struggle for the freedom of the world and Ukraine that Putin pursues so viciously. As President Biden said yesterday, “It’s really outrageous to increase starvation.”
Not only has Putin’s one-man attack on the European and Western modern enlightenment models of civilization killed, wounded, maimed, and displaced millions of innocent Ukrainians: now he wants to hold equally innocent African children hostage to his personally vain attempt to punish Ukraine and its backers for whatever success the defenders have achieved in (partially) repulsing Putin’s conscripts and marauders.
On many grounds, as I said here months ago and better qualified commentators and investigators have noted many times over, Putin (Stalin’s successor) is a war criminal and needs to be tried for his many perpetrations of civilized norms. The babies of Ukraine have been killed in their orphanages. Some, spared in their crèches, have (illegally) been taken out of Ukraine and been “given” to Russian “parents.”
The list of Russian attacks on civilians in Ukraine’s south and east, plus its missile and drone attacks on civilians everywhere in Ukraine, multiply as war crimes. Investigators from the International Criminal Court are in Ukraine, taking testimony and visiting atrocity sites. But bringing Putin and his collaborators before any kind of tribunal, especially when the UN is paralyzed by Russian and Chinese vetoes in the Security Council, is never going to be easy. The moral case needs to be made, however, over and over.
Likewise, at home, can we somehow manage to prevent Trump and his acolytes from continuing to poison both the political and the moral atmosphere of our nation? The attack on Pelosi is only a canary in a polluted political mine. Trump’s lies, Trump’s blatherings, Trump’s refusals to heed prosecutors and law enforcement officials -- all of these assaults on American civil society and human decency – have made morality in public life seem optional and transactional. Putin is a Russian in the Soviet mold, so we might expect less attention to moral and respectable behavior. But an American president behaving with no respect for the Constitution, for failing to accept electoral victory and defeat that is at the core of the unwritten constitution? How can that be?
Even before Pearl Harbor, Wendell Willkie, Republican candidate for presidency against Franklin Delano Roosevelt, understood that his honesty and decent civility on the campaign trail was the consummate answer to the fascist preferences of the Charles Lindberghs and the Father Charles Edward Coughlins who were undermining Roosevelt’s principled opposition to Hitler’s aggressions and racist slaughters in Europe and attempting to roll-back the New Deal reforms that had given hope and sustenance to underprivileged Americans during the Depression.
President Biden has led these United States against Putin’s immorality in the existential conflict of our century. He is also a counter to Trump. Are there any non-partisan Republicans left who can stand up for American morality in the face of Trumpish attacks (and the idiocies of Herschel Walker, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the like)?
Trump and Putin go hand in hand. The attack on Paul Pelosi should be our wake up call if America and the world are to be rescued from perdition (and the ultimate triumph of a Xi Jinping). The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has its doomsday clock. Internally and globally, we are closer in our moral depravity to midnight than ever before.