Whose Land Is This?
Is It for You and Me?
Appalling stories were going the rounds, and there was talk of handwritten posters telling the bourgeois that they were about to get a knife in their bellies; nobody had seen them, but this did not stop anyone from quoting them verbatim.
~ Émile Zola, Germinal
One week from today, April 20, Christians around the world will commemorate Easter, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the very foundation of the faith’s existence. Coincidentally, April 20 will also be the 136thanniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler, making it the most important day of the year for Nazis, neo- and otherwise.
April 20, 2025 may also mark the de facto end of American constitutional order. Not on paper, though. The charade that it still exists will likely be maintained for some time to come.
One week from today is the deadline for the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security to report to the president about whether to impose the 1807 Insurrection Act on the American people, disguised as border protection. The fuse for the coming catastrophe was lit in the first hours of the Trump administration, hidden in Sec. 6(b) of one of a flurry of executive orders, Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States:
The once unimaginable specter of American military force being used against American citizens on American soil is no longer theoretical; it seems only a matter of time before citizens’ blood will flow. The chants of “Blood and Soil” made by Nazis who marched and murdered in Charlottesville, Virginia on April 12, 2017 – just eight years ago yesterday – are becoming public policy.
Clues leading to this assumption are in clear sight. Yet, the pardoning of the terrorism of mob violence against the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and the widespread acceptance of the lies of the November 2020 election being stolen makes them appear more than plausible.
Trump’s first term was a prelude. His claim, in the wake of the Charlottesville Nazi march, that it “had some very fined people on both sides,” was not only absurd, it absolved borderline treason.
And as Trump cowered in the bunker of the White House during peaceful Black Lives Matter protests on May 29, 2020, he asked Secretary of Defense Michael Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mike Milley if protesters could be shot in the legs before tear gas and police batons were unleashed. Then he posed with an upside-down Bible in front of the church opposite Lafayette Square from the White House with Esper and Milley, who both regretted standing at Trump’s side.
More recently, the Trump administration has openly defied multiple court orders to stop the illegal transfers of documented and undocumented immigrants to secret prisons outside and within the nation.
As I noted in an earlier article, some of this administration’s tactics mimic “the actions of the Iranian Shah’s SAVAK, Duvalier’s Tonton Macoute in Haiti, and the abductions of desaparecidos by the miliary dictatorships in Argentina and Chile’s Pinochet in the 1970s and 1980s.” According to credible reports, these actions will soon be extended to include American citizens.
Dismissive comments about and defiance of judicial authority from the so-called “border czar” Tom Homan, Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), pick up where the first Trump administration left off. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s dismissal of judicial review, taken together with the Supreme Court’s Loper decision to meddle whenever they see fit, lets the administration argue “correctly” that it can do anything it chooses without fear of judicial restraint.
Most ominous, however, are the rampant firings of career, nonpolitical, military leadership, the appointment of a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who has none of the once mandatory qualifications one must have had just to be considered for the post, and the firing the entire leadership of each service’s legal branch, the Judge Advocates General.
After the Supreme Court’s 1831 Worcester v. Georgia decision, that the taking of Cherokee lands taken and mass removal was unconstitutional, an apocryphal remark was attributed to President Andrew Jackson: Chief Justice “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”
It underscored an essential truth, that consent requires public officials and citizen to accept and respect norms without threats or dismissals. Once ignored or openly defied, arbitrary force becomes legitimate through action.
During the past two weekends, mass protests have taken place in every state and the District of Columbia. If a nonviolent protest scared Trump to retreat in fear to a bunker under the White House and speculate shooting peaceful dissidents, does it not stand to reason he would order much worse once in claiming the authority to actually do it?
Especially when he repeatedly called political opponents “vermin” and immigrants “animals” during the last campaign? We all know how actual vermin is dealt with.
The verifiable facts of Charlottesville, speculation about shooting Americans expressing their 1st amendment rights, lying about a national election, absolving those who would attack American institutions to give life to those lies, the creation of an American secret police, dismissal of judicial authority unless it lines up with decisions already made, and the politicization of the American military all lead undeniable conclusion that the American experiment may well be on its last legs.
The statement attributed to Jackson is no longer mythical; it is a portent, one that will likely come into undeniable focus on April 20.
A criminally underrated film from 1943, This Land is Mine, is instructive for our times. Directed by French director Jean Renoir[1] and starring Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara, the plot is centered around a mythical French town in World War II under Nazi occupation. Laughton and O’Hara portray elementary school teachers, he a coward, she a principled citizen.
Their Nazi overlords deem certain writings unacceptable, and both are told to direct their students to tear out pages from texts. As they do so, an air raid siren goes off, scaring the children.
While walking to the basement bomb shelter, O’Hara’s character tells her students, “Don’t be nervous. We have plenty of time. We must take shelter. Even from our friends in the sky…I want you to give me all the pages you’ve taken out of your books. The day will come when we can place them back where they belong.”
When in the shelter, explosions around them prompt the mother of Laughton’s character to complain about bombing civilians, asking why they don’t stay home and bomb Germany, O’Hara replies, “I wish I could see the sky full of them. Every factory and railroad in Europe is Germany until the Germans are driven out.”
O’Hara’s brother, belonging to the French resistance, later fails to assassinate the German commander, two German soldiers are killed instead. Laughton is arrested as a suspect and is ready to accede to the German commander’s wishes to declare himself guilty in exchange for a pardon. He finds his courage after seeing his schoolmaster and nine others suspects executed in the prison courtyard.
Laughton withdraws his confession in court, causing the Nazi-sympathizing prosecutor to object before being overruled.[2] He begins by calling himself “a very lucky man,” knowing the courtroom “is the only place left in my country where a man can still speak out,” explaining he was, up until that moment, a coward:
I wanted to live. I had very good reasons to live…it's very hard for people like you and me to understand what is evil and what is good.
It's easy for the working people to understand who the enemy is because the aim of this invasion and this occupation is to make them slaves. But middle-class people like us can easily believe…that the German victory is not such a bad thing. Well, we hear people say that too much liberty brings chaos and disorder…
Oh, it's very easy to talk about heroism in the free countries. But it's hard to talk about it here where our people are starving. The hard truth is, the hungrier we get the more we need our heroes. We must stop saying that sabotage is wrong, that it doesn't pay. It does pay. It makes us suffer, starve, and die. But though it increases our misery, it will shorten our slavery.
That's our hard choice, I know. But…first, we have to fight ourselves. The occupation – any occupation, in any land – is only possible because we are corrupt. And I accuse myself first. For my own comfort and security, I made no protest against the mutilation of truth in our schoolbooks…
If the occupation lasts long enough, the men who are taking advantage of it will own the town. I don't blame you for making money, but you should blame yourselves for making the occupation possible. Because you cannot do these things without playing into the hands of the real rulers of the town – the Germans!
…I know you must condemn me to die…because I've tried to tell the truth. And the truth can't be allowed to live under the occupation. It's too dangerous…Officially, you'll find me guilty of murder. But don't worry, my friends. Even if you were to acquit me, and I would walk out of this court a free man, the enemy would take me and put me up against a wall – and you too. They can find any reason to take hostages.
Oh, there's one final charge I must answer to – and I'm very guilty…[the German commander] said a very funny thing to me last night. He told me I wasn't a coward. I think he was right.
And I'm not the only one who's not a coward. This town is full of courage. I am proud of it. I am proud to be born and die here.[3]
Laughton was right. When he returns to the school, he knows he will be arrested soon, conveying his newly found courage to his students.
As an American military dependent who attending school and later often visiting Germany, I took a certain pride in a common German description about the United States, that it was das Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten – the land of unlimited opportunity. They well knew the United States was imperfect. Yet, the aspirational credo of the United States striving to become a more perfect Union stuck.
In that spirit, I ask our friends around the world – not to bomb us – but to do what you can and must to help overcome the civic sickness of hate and intolerance now occupying this nation. Please don’t travel here for any reason, whether on vacation, business, or even to attend big, important meetings like ASCO or ASH.
That’s how you can help and support us most. Many Americans understand, like O’Hara’s character, by doing so you will be the friends we most need. Those of us who grasp the losses of what this nation once stood for encourage you to do what you must to help us find our way back. Hopefully it is not too late already.
For those of us already here, horrified on a seemingly a minute-by-minute basis, we will have to endure and resist. Many will pay heavy prices. DOGE (sic) algorithms are flagging “unacceptable” words in scientific research papers like “cultural,” “female,” and “minority” as possibly unacceptable. This leads me to suspect, even for an obscure forum like this with a miniscule audience, what I write may one day be tagged as suspicious, even treasonous, sometime soon.
Not that my writing in any way compares to what many now being detained for specious reasons in our names as citizens are suffering. Nor does it equate, for example, to the generations to come who will be diagnosed with avoidable diseases linked to environmental neglect now being promoted and sanctioned by the Trump administration. Or the many injustices coming with political and policy decisions based on a malleable Constitution.
In future years, especially for the most slavish adherents of the Trump cult, April 20 may well take a prominent place alongside July 4 in national celebrations. Perhaps they will see it as a twofer. After next Sunday, Easter will not fall on April 20 again until the year 2087. By then it may well be a threefer.
Lately I’ve been repeatedly listening to Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land – which, in my opinion, should long have been the American national anthem. I am forced to question whose land this is.
The resurrection of the American democratic-republic is looking more doubtful with each passing day.
[1] Renoir’s masterpiece, La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game), made in 1939, is a parable about the hypocrisies in French society that starkly exposed some of the key reasons for what was in store for the nation in World War II.
[2] You can watch the scene and read the full transcript here.
[3] If you still feel the need to be bucked up, I highly recommend watching this scene from Laughton’s first comedy in which, playing an English butler, he recites the Gettysburg Address in a saloon in the American West.
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Thank you, once again.