Why it’s useful to read the Niemöller poem backward.
Since Donald Trump’s rise to political power in this country, the famous poem cautioning that the horrors of autocracy would extend to the entire nation of Germany, Pastor Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came,” has gotten quite a bit of mileage in the United States.
While meant to be a warning that brutality, cruelty, and lawlessness extended toward some would not end with those first targeted, there have always been a few problems with the Niemöller poem. On Thursday, when the Trump administration targeted former FBI Director James Comey for a political prosecution that wasn’t even pretending to be anything other than spurious and malicious—just two weeks after removing a critical comedian from the U.S. airwaves—at least some of the flaws in that Niemöller poem could be seen quite clearly.: You’re meant to understand what it all means the very instant you get to “They came for the Communists.” But, of course, in the United States they’ve been coming for the Communists for many decades. The poem only ever really convinces most folks on the day. So come for Haitian refugees, and people who look or sound as if they might be immigrants, then for Jimmy Kimmel, and for Jim Comey, andThe other problem with the Niemöller poem is that it presents as sequential; you can tell yourself that there will be months, years, eons between their coming for the Comeys and the Haitians and the time they come for you. So when, in the span of a few short days, they in fact, I mean, my dude, other than the coming for “you,” part, it’s the whole damn poem in the span of a week. But still, the poem only ever really works on the day they come for you.It’s no surprise that Trump, who knows nothing about governance and the Constitution, understands one thing very well: A government dominated by TV personalities and podcast hosts needn’t answer to the demands of its institutions. It doesn’t matter that the White House isn’t meant to direct prosecutions of the president’s political enemies helmed by the Justice Department for noncrimes can’t fire a U.S. attorney for declining to bring charges and replace him with your insurance lawyer who willby way of executive order. Once you’re streaming live from the Colosseum, it’s only a matter of giving the people what they want. And while theyin much the same way folks once felt a little meh about the Socialists, the Trade Unionists, and the Jews. And so our challenge right now is to broaden our sphere of concern to include the personalities about whom you may currentlyand the institutions about which you may currently have no feelings at all. To figure out what a short hop it is from “meh” toThe whole point of picking off precisely those who are either too vulnerable to fight back, or too famous to warrant your concern, or too unpopular for you to do anything but shrug, is that it leaves ample space for everyone to be exhausted, to tune out, tobecause it’s the Jimmy Kimmel Show or because you’re a monster fan of Jim Comey or Tish James, but because the other side in each of these battles comprises a massing legal armada capable of destroying every one of those people until it comes for the next guy. Most ordinary Americans can go years without thinking about what the DOJ, the FBI, the FCC, and the National Archives do all day. And now that what they increasingly do all day is to target Trump’s enemies, it’s vitally important to understand what that means, and it’s doubly important to credit theThere are reasons the founders were terrified of monarchic powers deployed to search, investigate, prosecute, and punish trivial crimes. It is precisely the evil from which they fled. There are reasons the awesome prosecutorial and punitive powers of the federal government have been constrained by centuries of norms, regulations, and guidance. And even in the breach—and there has beenspeech to U.S. attorneys, “The Federal Prosecutor,” still remained true. As Jackson warned, federal prosecutors hold “more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America.” He continued:The prosecutor can order arrests, present cases to the grand jury in secret session, and on the basis of his one-sided presentation of the facts, can cause the citizen to be indicted and held for trial. He may dismiss the case before trial, in which case the defense never has a chance to be heard. Or he may go on with a public trial. If he obtains a conviction, the prosecutor can still make recommendations as to sentence, as to whether the prisoner should get probation or a suspended sentence, and after he is put away, as to whether he is a fit subject for parole. While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.As Jackson went on to note, it is not at all optimal to concentrate that much power in any one person, but it has been deemed a necessity for the purpose of fighting crime. The problem for the federal prosecutor is that, the justice warned, he holds the power to choose his cases, which allows him to choose his defendants. And from there, it’s just a baby step to “picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.”Charlie Kirk’s Group Held Its First Post-Assassination Campus Tour Event. It Was Extreme—and Revealing.Think You’re Smarter Than a Slate Associate Editor? Find Out With This Week’s News Quiz. What is most amazing about the Justice Department’s prosecutions of Comey, investigation of Bolton, and threats against Sen. Adam Schiff, James, and others is that the president openly directed his attorney general to go after them promptly, then bragged about firing Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney who declined to pursue indictments, then placed his lawyerin the position to get the thing done and set a stopwatch for her to do it. Of course, she then alone signed a bare-bones Comey indictment that contains nearly no details of the alleged crimes. And then, having rolled around the floor screaming about wanting indictments the way a toddler pitches a fit at Toys “R” Us, the president glided into the Oval Office to say that none of it had had anything to do with him, intoning Thursday, “I think I’d be allowed to get involved if I want, but I don’t really choose to do so. I can only say that Comey is a bad person. He’s a sick person. I think he’s a sick guy, actually. He did terrible things at the FBI. And—but I don’t know. I have no idea what’s going to happen.”Of course, Trump knew exactly what was going to happen because he had spent several days making it clear that those who didn’t make it happen would be fired and those who did would be rewarded. He doesn’t care that Comey will probably manage to get the lawsuit dismissed, or that the U.S. attorney will fail to convict. Because there is only one play here, which is to show not only that the DOJ works exclusively for Donald Trump, but that it is willing to do anything, includingand malicious prosecutions, exclusively for Donald Trump. The point of this kind of flex isn’t Jim Comey any more than it’s Tish James or the New York Times. The point is that after he comes for them, he can come for you. That’s how authoritarians work, how they have always worked, and it’s why it’s useful to read the Niemöller poem
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