Historic film providing a glimpse of future? - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Looking for a movie to watch, last week we pulled The Book Thief off the shelf. The 2013 movie is a lesson in where extremism can lead us.

 

The movie is adapted from a 2005 novel by Australian author Markus Zusack, who sold 17 million copies in 63 languages. It tells of nine-year-old Liesel Meminger (played by young French-Canadian actress Sophie Nélisse), who is growing up in Nazi Germany in 1938. Her mother is a Communist and that’s illegal in Nazi Germany. She and her brother are adopted by a German couple, Hans and Rosa Hubermann, but the brother dies before they arrive.

 

The rest of the movie shows Liesel’s life inside Germany with the Nazis in control. At one time they are visited by a young Jew whose father had saved Hans’ life during World War I but is now in danger from the Nazis. They hide him in their basement because they have a sense of responsibility for him, even though they are short on food. At one time, they nervously hide him when German authorities are inspecting basements looking for those that are adequate for bomb shelters.

 

The story goes on as the war begins and Hans, though an aging man, is taken for the army, and later wounded.

 

I won’t go on and spoil the story, in case you watch it, but the movie reminded me of the danger that we face in North America today with a dictatorial U.S. President determined that he alone, without Congress or the courts, will decide U.S. policy.

 

In his first term in 2017, Donald Trump defended the white nationalists  and neo-Nazis who protested in Charlottesville, Virginia saying they included “some very fine people,” while expressing sympathy for their demonstration against the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, although the protest ended with the death of one woman and injuries to dozens of others.

 

As Trump prepared to take office for his second term, a number of Republicans who support Nazism hoped that he would bring about a new wave of support.

 

Honestly, Donald Trump’s presidency is not as harsh as Adolf Hitler’s. While Trump is rounding up hundreds of thousands of immigrants, keeping them in harsh jails and eventually deporting them, this isn’t as bad as Hitler’s extermination camps where six million Jews, Roma people and other despised people were gassed and then cremated.

 

On the weekend, Trump’s armed forces attacked Iran. Iran is not Poland, France and Holland that Hitler conquered. It is a dreadful dictatorship where supposed priests have women arrested and jailed simply for letting their hair show beneath their hijabs. They have killed thousands of protesters.

 

Still, many of the people who voted for Donald Trump thought he was an isolationist. Instead, he has attacked Iran twice and captured the former President of Venezuela. Trump’s armed forces attack small boats every few days, claiming they are running drugs to the U.S., killing more than 100 people all told. All this without support of Congress which is required under U.S. law.
He has openly, and repeatedly, said he wants Canada to become the 51st U.S. state - a single state that would be larger than the entire U.S. He has sought, until opposed by European countries, to annex Greenland. He has cut off Cuba from oil imports hoping to force its government out of office and return the country to the playground for wealthy casino owners it was before Fidel Castro took power in 1959 and turned Cuba Communist.

 

Did those who elected Donald Trump know this would happen? They would have had an inkling if they had read Project 2025, the not-so-secret document published in April of 2023 by the Heritage Foundation with the goal of reshaping the U.S. federal government by consolidating executive power in favour of right-wing policies. Donald Trump said he hadn’t read it but so far his presidency has followed its urgings.

 

The project’s policy document, “Mandate for Leadership”, calls for the replacement of federal civil service workers by people loyal to “the next conservative president” (done) and for taking partisan control of the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Commerce, and the Federal Trade Commission  (done). Other agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Education, would be dismantled. It calls for reducing environmental regulations and realigning the National Institutes of Health  with conservative priorities  (done).

 

Is the U.S. close to being Hitler’s Germany? Bad as it is, it’s not the Germany of the 1930s and early 1940s yet - but then Trump is only one year into his term.