What Did You Do In The War?

Know The Risks

Rise Up

When I was about 8, I asked my father what he did during the war, that war being World War II. Dad was a first generation Jewish boy in Cleveland. The Army trained him as a spy. His mission was to learn Hungarian, parachute into Hungary, gather information on Nazi military sites and plans, and make his way to Ukraine. Fortunately, the war ended before his suicidal mission was launched. His aunts, uncles and cousins in Poland and Ukraine did not fare as well. They were rounded up by the Nazis and shot, or sent to concentration camps. Uncle Zalman, Aunt Rachel, and her husband Josef were shot. Aunt Hiyanna and her two children Dov and Pesche were sent to the Riga concentration camp. Of our family, three people survived the war; my father, his cousin Dov, and his cousin Pesche.

Right now, in our country, the United States of America, thousands of people are to be kidnapped by order of the president and sent to prison camps, including a prison camp in the Everglades, to be housed in cages inside tents. Right now, masked men representing that they are from ICE invade neighborhoods, snatch people off the streets, bash in a car window with a hammer, grab people, take them to prisons, send them to foreign lands, with no due process. This is the United States of America where this is happening right now.

Sit with this. Feel it.

Right now, in our country, millions of people have just lost their access to medical care, rural hospitals will be closing, and the man in charge of health care in the United States has ideas as scientific as those of Stalin’s agronomist Trofim Lysenko. (Lysenko rejected genetics in favor of his own cockamamie ideas. Lysenko played an active role in the famines that killed millions of Soviet people.) Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has stated that he does not believe in vaccines but his own children are vaccinated. Last week, he said the U.S. would cut off more than a billion dollars that had previously been promised over the next few years.

Right now, in our country, people exercising our First Amendment right to free speech and freedom of assembly are being persecuted. Universities are being sued and stripped of funding because the president dislikes what he calls unlawful DEI. Right now, the president has defunded USAID, condemning millions of the poorest children on earth to misery, starvation, and death.

Right now, in our country, the wealthiest men and women have received a tax cut for no reason, and the Republican party has become the Cult of the Biggest Baboon. Right now, that Cult has ignored the will of millions of Americans and voted to pass a budget bill that adds $3.3 trillion to the national debt, without any consideration of what it will do to the people of this country, or to the economy. They ignored the thousands of telephone calls, emails, faxes, visits, demonstrations, sit-ins, and testimony of citizens who elected them. They did so with impunity. They have impunity.

So it appears that we are currently in a civil war. Each of us has to acknowledge it, and decide how much risk we are in without further action. Are you a Senior on Medicaid? A Black or Brown Senior on Medicaid? A Low Profile White Senior on Medicare in a well to do suburb? A demonstrating student of Arab descent?

Next, decide how much risk you are willing to take on for yourself and your family on behalf of others. Will you have young Latinas walk behind you in a demonstration? Think "we're not yet being asked to harbor Others in the attic, or behind the wall." Think "in my country, by order of the president, people are kidnapped and sent to cages in tents in the Florida Everglades."

This paper is extremely helpful in organizing the information available to us about risks. Here is a pull quote:

People living in autocracies are, by definition, hampered in their freedom to act and they are taking risks if they dissent or defy or resist the regime.
A person’s level of risk depends on the degree of autocracy they live in as well as on personal and collective factors.

Such factors include citizenship (visa status), vulnerability of family members, gender, race, ethnicity, seniority of position and other attributes that
render a person more or less vulnerable to arbitrary action.

To illustrate, a senior white male scholar who is a citizen is less at risk than a female person of color on a temporary visa. This is the case even within functional democracies, and much more so in autocratic regimes.

When deciding how to act in an autocracy, you should first assess your personal risk: is it low, medium, high, or extreme?

What appears to be the cost of opposing the government? In a democracy,
citizens should not suffer any consequences for peaceful opposition to the government. If people or institutions are incurring a cost for opposition, then this should enter into the risk assessment.

You also need to consider the risk level of others around you, who might be affected by your actions.
This is particularly important if you are in a senior position and lead a team with members who are at greater risk, and when your family and community are vulnerable. How might your actions affect
them?

Remember: Autocracies do not last forever. An analysis of 323 nonviolent and violent mass movements from 1900-2006 that sought to topple a government or achieve self-determination revealed that most or all movements that recruited at least 3.5% popular participation ultimately succeeded. Moreover, successful
movements tended to be predominantly nonviolent.
Although there are exceptions to this “3.5% rule”, it provides an encouraging
benchmark. For the U.S., 3.5% of the population translates into nearly 12 million people.

What will we do in this war? Some day, your children, your grandchildren, may ask you what you did.