Concern for victims at home may bring to mind our victims abroad

Caution: This column contains mention of sexual violence readers may find disturbing.

By Herbert Rothschild

Near the end of “The Bad Old Days” (published in 2021), my account of my participation in the struggles for justice in the Deep South in the ’60s and ’70s, I wrote that when Jimmy Carter was elected president, I felt I could at last relax. Then I went on to say that I was soon disabused of my complacency.

At the risk of qualifying — though not contradicting — the outpouring of esteem for Carter upon his passing, I’ll share what I was seeing a year after he took office: “By 1978 . . . he was asking for [military] budget increases, and was sustaining development of new and destabilizing nuclear weapons like the MX missile, cruise missiles and Trident II, an improved submarine launched missile. Even more distressing was Carter’s commitment of U.S. forces — personnel and weapons — to Indonesia’s illegal takeover of East Timor. . . . And he continued to send military aid to the repressive government of El Salvador.”

I recall this experience because the conclusions I reached then are pertinent now. One was that the forces of death control Washington no matter who occupies the White House. Another was that if we are serious about justice and peace, our commitment must be continuous and lifelong, not episodic.

Like most of my readers, I’m anxious about what the second Trump presidency will bring. I remind myself, however, that for most of my life people in many parts of the world have been suffering in large measure because of the actions of my country. The Vietnamese and Cambodians, the Chileans and Haitians, the Afghanis and Iraqis and Palestinians — all those and many others have had to endure miseries compared to which whatever I may have to endure in the next four years will be slight.

And maybe it’s time for those of us living in the exceptional nation to realize the consequences of that presumptuous self-understanding. Those living elsewhere know them all too well.

I can’t remember when our country didn’t frame all international conflict as a contest between good and evil. It was the pablum we were fed in our schools and continue to be fed by our political leaders and the mainstream media. Now, domestic conflict is being framed in that same juvenile, self-pandering and deadly way. Donald Trump seems intent on eliminating his personal enemies, but with his encouragement part of his political base expects a more extensive crusade against the enemy within. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Venezuela may be replaced in our consciousness by a new Axis of Evil: nonwhite immigrants, Muslims, the transgendered, leftists. If the repression is successful at its start, some will want to cast the net even more widely.

We can’t stave off this danger by acting out of that same self-righteousness. Our first challenge is to reject a Manichaean mindset. If we approach members of our families or our neighbors or our colleagues who supported Trump as if they are our moral or intellectual inferiors, we will transform disagreements into antagonisms and render palatable to them official acts that their basic decency would otherwise condemn.

Nevertheless, we probably will have to confront repression. No one knows whether our institutional safeguards against authoritarian rule will function effectively. There are historical examples — such as Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and FDR’s internment of Japanese Americans — when those safeguards were overcome by appeals to national emergency. We must be outspoken in encouraging Congress and the federal courts to perform their sworn duties, and we must be even more outspoken if they don’t.

I’m certain that the level of state violence it would take to silence all of us who wish to preserve basic human rights and the rule of law in this country would be unacceptable to a majority of our fellow Americans. My concern is that we’ll silence ourselves through fear, fatigue or despair. Or even worse — by the perception that because our own ox isn’t being gored, the situation can’t be all that bad. We simply must stay alert to what people who differ from us in geography or circumstance are experiencing.

That last admonition returns me to our collective failure to identify with the victims of our imperial foreign policy in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Much of that failure stems from their near invisibility in our mainstream media, which devotes little coverage to our behavior abroad and, for the little it does, closely hews to the official line. It’s not that there aren’t alternative news sources from which we can read about what we’ve been doing, but we must be motivated to seek them out.

I call to mind Bill Ford, whom I came to know when I was working in Montclair, New Jersey, in the late 1980s. Bill told me that he had never given any thought to El Salvador until Dec. 2, 1980, when his sister Ita, a Maryknoll sister, along with Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan, was raped and murdered by a death squad while the women were working with the poor there. Thousands of Salvadorans had already experienced a similar fate, but they had been beyond his ken.

Perhaps the coming repression at home will serve to globalize our moral consciences.

Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear Fridays. Opinions expressed in them represent the author’s views. Email Rothschild at herbertrothschild6839@gmail.com.