Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor and theologian who helped found Germany’s Confessing Church in order to resist the rise of Naziism, was executed by the Nazis on April 9, 1945.
He left behind "Letters and Papers from Prison," published as a book, within which he wrote:
"Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice… Against stupidity we are defenseless; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack."
Today, as I write, New Hampshire is 24 hours away from what was to be a Donald Trump political rally at the Portsmouth International Airport.
It was just canceled: Postponed they say, because of the weather!
Forget about it.
It was canceled, I believe, because citizens of the Granite State were too smart to be lured into a COVID-19 super-spreader event – and because no one but the most die-hard Trumpistas were going to show up anyway and his handlers didn’t want Trump to be again humiliated as he was in Tulsa.
No doubt, had he arrived, Trump would have been enthusiastically greeted by his apostles; his red-capped political panderers, historical revisionists, anti-Semites, Islamophobes, anti-vaxxers, racists, bigots, brownshirts, and other fellow travelers gathered to pay obeisance to their leader.
A leader who is nothing more than a garden variety racist pimped-out in bespoke Brioni suits, a leader seemingly proud to be an anti-intellectual, uneducated, incurious, unintelligent, uncultured – and astonishingly inarticulate – president.
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been," Isaac Asimov wrote. "The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’"
What’s not astonishing, then, is that his devotees are equally proud to be ignorant, proud to gather in darkened dens where their fragile egos are never challenged by truth.
"To this aversion [to truth]…," Hannah Arendt wrote in "The Origins of Totalitarianism," "must be added the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts … that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition."
Many of Trump’s fragile followers – people who believe that their world, which they delusionally believe was once a white, prosperous, stable, post-World War II America –believe that America has unraveled and is in societal decline.
Believe that Donna Reed and Leave it to Beaver have been martyred on the altar of political correctness.
In their tendentious telling of history the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in 1963 – within hours after President Kennedy's nationally televised Civil Rights address – isn’t relevant; it’s irrelevant that when Evers was taken to the hospital in Jackson, Mississippi, he was initially refused treatment because of his race.
Within their fragile world, cisgendered white men never had to face Bull Conner’s dogs, get beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, drink at colored-only water fountains, hanged from trees, or turned away from from lunch counters.
They didn’t have to pay poll taxes, wait for Brown v. Board of Education to learn to read, get red-lined and denied mortgages, and drink poisoned water.
In their telling of history, America bears no original sin for its enslavement and dehumanization of African Americans and its genocide of Native Americans and the theft of Native lands.
In their telling the Confederate battle-flag should fly high, United States military bases should be named after traitors and monuments to racists should continue to pollute the American landscape.
They don’t see the injustice and inhumanity of interning Americans of Japanese descent in concentration camps and they don’t recognize the existence of Native Americans confined on reservations where the life expectancy is the second lowest in the Western Hemisphere – after Haiti.
White children weren’t martyred alongside Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin, and privileged whites didn’t die alongside George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, Elijah McClain, and others.
Trump and his devoted votaries live in such limited, shallow worlds of grievance and prejudice that it’s no wonder that they don’t understand that Black lives matter.
Black lives have never mattered to them. To them there is no systemic racism and white privilege because being privileged is their normative experience.
In their narration, New Hampshire isn’t the place that welcomed an enslaved Ona Judge when she fled imprisonment at the hands of George and Martha Washington but a state where today a president’s supporters feel free to post vile lies, misrepresentations and comments about minority communities and people of color.
Years ago, when I returned to New Hampshire, I believed we had moved to a place that, while not historically diverse or multicultural, was becoming increasingly tolerant and beginning to move away from its William Loeb-inspired white parochial, provincial Republican base.
Boy, was I wrong.
This is an existential moment in our history and we’re being called upon to embrace spiritual and cultural change that fully embodies the aspirational values expressed by our Founding Fathers – that all people are created equal!
Today – perhaps more than ever – we are called upon to be vigilant, to be attentive to Bonhoeffer, Asimov and Arendt, to be intentional in our resistance to voices of hatred and intolerance that threaten our Republic’s foundations, foundations dependent upon shared values of morality, justice, equity, and fairness.
We have, in the past, risen as a nation to oppose oppressors and tyrants from foreign lands. We should be no less committed to oppose those who, in our midst, threaten our existence not with malice but out of stupidity.
I hope that my neighbors, having exhibited the common sense necessary to protect themselves and their families by refusing to be drawn into a political rally at Pease, will build upon that civic action by refusing to be further drawn into political discourse that furthers division and threatens our very existence as a democracy.
Stupidity is the dangerous enemy of the Good – and that endangers us all.
Robert Azzi, a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter, can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. The views expressed are those of the writer. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.
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