Guest post: The asteroid doesn’t care
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Ownership.
I’m getting increasingly annoyed when people make a point of how America already has military bases on Greenland and are free to pretty much do what they want. So if they didn’t have have the Danish government’s permission to act as if they owned the place, that would indeed be a legitimate reason to invade? There’s a reason why negotiating with terrorists is considered such a terrible idea. If it were up to me, the American forces on Greenland would be given 24 hours to get the hell out the moment Trump put forth his threat (at the very latest).
As embarrassing as it must be (or at least should!) to be American these days, it’s hardly any better to be European. It’s been sickening to watch our leaders compete to abase themselves before the orange bully and sacrifice every shred of integrity, dignity and honor in exchange for less than nothing. If cringiness had mass, the world would have collapsed into a black hole long ago. Not only are they failing to protect Europe, but they’re turning it into something not even worth protecting. I don’t know whether the European spine died with Churchill and De Gaulle or simply atrophied out of existence through decades of disuse, but anyway it’s gone.
Think of Trump’s America as asteroid on a direct collision course with the Earth. You wouldn’t waste your time trying to talk the asteroid into changing its trajectory or argue about what we need the asteroid to do? It doesn’t care. You simply do whatever you have to do to push it out of the way. There is no harm the asteroid is going to do if you fail to appease it that it’s not going to do anyway. Same with Trump. He is going to do as much harm and evil as you allow him to do, and that’s it. There is no possible consequence of fighting back with everything you’ve got that’s worse than failure to do so.
I’m terrible at remembering who said what and when, but someone at a recent podcast made the point that many European leaders lack the confidence to take a strong bold stance against Trump because their popular support is so weak. Well, maybe their popular support is weak precisely because they’re perceived as so feeble and pathetic and spineless and lacking in character. They’re sure as hell not doing anything to earn my support. At least we can all stop pretending to be baffled by how the Germans could go along with the the Nazis and still manage to live with themselves: We’re seeing the same collective failure play out before our eyes right now. There’s a reason why the first lesson from Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny was “Don’t obey in advance”. Because if you fail that test, you have already failed all the others.
Speaking of which, this is anecdotal, so don’t take my word for it, but supposedly the guy who coined “Godwin’s Law” has retracted his own invention in the light of recent events. Taken literally, the so-called “Hitler fallacy” was, of course, always kind of a silly idea. Obviously analogies to Hitler and the Nazis should be used with caution, but to dismiss any such analogy as inherently fallacious in principle pretty much amounts to saying that there is nothing we can possibly learn from the worst atrocities in history. That doesn’t seem like a very useful lesson to me.
A much more useful concept is the “Historian’s Fallacy” which basically boils down to thinking and acting as if people in the past had access to the same information that’s available to us now about what was going to happen later. When Hitler was elected Reichskanzler in 1933, the horrors of World War 2 and the Holocaust were still years into the future, and it is fallacious to take our current knowledge of what happened later into account when judging the behavior of the Germans at the time. This still does not get the Germans off the hook, however, since the information that was available to them – Hitler’s attempted coup d’état, his obvious extremism as expressed in Mein Kampf, his many speeches, the party program of the N.S.D.A.P. etc. – should have been more than enough to conclude that this person needed to be kept as far away from the reins of power as possible. Likewise, the information that is already available about Trump (and has been since before he was first elected in 2016) should have been more than enough to lead any sane and halfway decent person to the exact same conclusion, and this remains true even if – by some miracle – we manage to get out of the current crisis relatively unscathed. Again, it’s fallacious to take things that haven’t happened yet into account. If anything, the people who go along with Trump now have even less of an excuse than the Germans of the 1930s. For one thing, we really do have the benefit of knowing how things turned out back them. And, of course, as much as there is reason to worry about the weaponization of the American legal system, the role of ICE etc., the risk associated with opposing Trump is still negligible compared to risk associated with opposing Hitler once he came to power.
The very concept of democracy as a form of government is under attack, in part because people can vote to weaken it. Electing stronger leaders is risky because power itself is addictive. When Wellstone was elected initially he had run on a promise of a two-term legacy, but then decided to run for a third and received great criticism for it. He may be a hero to many who respect democracy, but it’s a demonstration that no matter how good their intentions at the start, politicians believe that theirs are the only efforts that will continue their mission. It’s not much different from the Trump incantation at his first convention acceptance speech: “Only I can fix it.” The delicate balance in democracy is to create a form that can achieve common goals of a nation, state, province, or municipality without allowing actors to become too powerful individuality. I am beginning to understand the drive for term limits. We are seeing the effects of it in our Congress and especially the Senate as a gerontocracy hold the seats and make decisions based on their desire for re-election rather than on serving the people.
And I wonder if that is also what is happening in Europe, if as you say that the leaders are caving because they don’t perceive that they have the power to stand up to the leader of the United States. I know that Starmer hasn’t been there all that long and Labour has a strong enough majority that they don’t have to worry about a no-confidence vote. He should be able to stand up fairly easily. But, I don’t know enough about how the rest of European leaders are maintaining their balance between being re-elected and doing the right thing.
Appeasing Trump is exactly the wrong thing to do. The only way to get him to back down is to exert authority over him. He doesn’t have to worry about his own supporters if he reverses course on an issue, because they will insist that he was weaving to get where he got all along, or else, as Karoline insists, it was always sunny and there was never rain, you stupid liberal.
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