Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo
Souvenirs for sale in St. Petersburg, Russia, to mark Trump’s first inauguration, January 2017
I know that many on the left are going through what might be termed Late Weimar Tremors, but for whatever it may be worth, yesterday’s spate of spite from the incoming president didn’t really put me in mind of Hitler.
Actually, it put me in mind of Stalin.
Consider, for instance, the executive order prepared for Trump by his transition team, on which The Wall Street Journal just reported. It would establish a “warrior board” of retired generals and admirals with the power to recommend the sacking of any current generals and admirals whom it deems soft on wokeness, or just meh on Trump. It would thereby bypass altogether the military’s promotion, demotion, and dismissal processes. The sacking of multiple top military leaders for presumed lack of personal loyalty to the president (and reluctance to send the Army against American citizens) is without precedent in American history.
It has ample precedent in Soviet history, however. As Stalin’s executions of most other Communist political leaders wound down in 1938, due largely to the shortage of remaining political leaders, he refocused his attention on the country’s Communist military leaders. In short order, he executed Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who had led the transformation of the Red Army into a sizable and well-led fighting force, as well as most other Soviet generals. By the time the purge was done, 35,000 officers had been discharged, many of them sent to the gulag and several thousand to their deaths. In consequence, the Soviet army was shellacked by the Finnish army when it invaded Finland in 1939, and was a largely leaderless sitting duck when Germany invaded the USSR in June of 1941.
I’m not suggesting that Trump would execute or imprison generals whose every breath he can’t completely control, just that the sacking of generals who don’t demonstrate abject personal loyalty to the whims of the head of government has a rich history.
So, too, does the conflicted loyalty of senior U.S. officials. Decrypts of once-secret Soviet intelligence files (the Venona Files in particular) in recent decades have revealed that some high-ranking officeholders, such as Harry Dexter White, who headed the international desk at the Treasury Department during World War II, were passing information to the Soviet Union, which, of course, was then our ally in the war against Hitler. (Despite that, White’s work at the Bretton Woods conference ensured that postwar U.S. domination of the world economy would proceed unhindered.)
Consider, now, the case of Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump nominated yesterday to be the director of national intelligence, the post in charge of the nation’s 18 spy agencies. We have no Venona Files on Gabbard, of course, but she has publicly expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin and support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with whom she met in 2017 after he’d killed numerous fellow Syrians with poison gas. Whatever she may be, Gabbard is no mole; her affinities for blood-drenched anti-American dictators are completely out in the open.
Then we come to Matt Gaetz, whom Trump nominated yesterday to be his attorney general. While Gabbard has no history or familiarity with intelligence agencies, Gaetz, at least, is no stranger to the justice system, having been investigated by Trump’s and then Biden’s Justice Department for alleged sexual crimes. His legal acumen is clearly demonstrated by his decision to resign from Congress yesterday, thereby keeping the bipartisan House Ethics Committee from releasing its impending report on his alleged misconduct. (The committee’s investigative powers are limited to sitting House members only.) While there’s no direct Stalin-era precedent for this, I will note that Stalin’s secret police head, Lavrentiy Beria, was known to have raped large numbers of underage women and girls while retaining Stalin’s support, chiefly for imprisoning and executing a sufficiently high number of fellow Russians.
So let’s forget all this Trump-Hitler nonsense and focus on Trump-Stalin!
