All the Little Eichmanns

Near the end of “War and Peace”, Leo Tolstoy offers up his ideas about the notion of the “great man of history.” I will leave it up to historians and other experts about the specifics of what he said and whether or not it holds up, but it comes down to this: there really is no such person because it’s the nameless people who actually make everything happen.

That’s where we are now.

I want to make it very clear that the president of the United States is not a great man but a great criminal. Perhaps the greatest criminal in American history. There has never been someone who tried to overthrow a fair and free election by force and then later got re-elected rather than jailed. This is a person beyond the textbook definition of “corrupt”, a person steering the ship of state directly into the reefs.

But what about the crew?

You see, none of this could happen without the willingness of countless men and women happy to serve. And each day, it becomes more apparent that the entire apparatus of the American federal government is staffed by morally corrupt and ethics-free functionaries who are carrying everything out. The Department of Justice alone has displayed its dedication to falsehood and abuse of power in ways that we expected from Soviet Russia, or regimes like North Korea. There are cases being pursued that the lawyers there know full damn well are baseless (James Comey, Jerome Powell, Letitia James, to name a few) and yet with gusto, they head off to court to charge them with the aim of convicting them. I keep wondering, “why are there not mass resignations?” until I realized that this is just a fantasy perpetrated by decades of mythologizing about how freedom-loving we Americans are. It could never dawn on me that we would not be the exception to any historical rule because as Americans, we fight against tyranny in ways great and small until justice prevails.

What farce.

Shortly after 9/11, I remember a University of Colorado professor by the name of Ward Churchill getting into all sorts of trouble because he dubbed office workers in the Twin Towers to be “technocratic Little Eichmanns”, knowingly supporting harmful U.S. policy. That phrase always stuck with me, clearly, because it’s taken 25 years for me to understand the general concept that he was trying to get across. It brings me back to Tolstoy’s notion that there is no such thing as a great man of history because it’s the nameless, faceless people who make it reality. So, I cannot say that the president of the United States is making any of what we are seeing happen on his own: a massive corps of bureaucratic functionaries are creating this climate of fear and weaponizing the law and federal power against us. ICE agents do not act on their own: they have the planning and connivance of an entire chain of command to terrorize non-citizens and kill actual citizens, like Renée Good and Alex Pretti, the former derided as a “lesbian bitch”. That can’t happen without the tacit approval and protection of many layers of people. And no, no one will truly be held accountable for it, so what is there to fear on their part? The “judgement of history”? Another farce.

The Department of Justice, Customs and Border Patrol, the Department of Homeland Security, the IRS, the National Guard and local law enforcement: how do we compete with this massive army of federal workers who are executing all of these malignant acts? They aren’t acting for us, they’re not protecting us: *we are their targets*. The bureaucracies of towns, counties, states, kingdoms and nations throughout history do not protect their populations, they ensure obedience and control on behalf of the ruling powers. They do not question the morality of what they are charged to carry out: they just do it. And in this climate, the federal workforce really is just an instrument of corruption and abuse of power, for which there will *never* be an accounting. Not only are they all just following orders, they’ll all later claim they were opposed and conflicted about these things the whole time.

And then, everybody will just forget because they want to move on.