The War on the Truth:Two Women’s Eyewitness Accounts

Many Americans believed that President Obama’s election in 2008 was the sign that a post-racial America had finally arrived. Despite the 17% increase in hate crime in 2017, far too many Americans just can’t believe that racial hatred really could be the catalyst to mass murder, Nazi protests, and white supremacy. Not here. Not now. Not us.

Then Mr. Trump came to the podium and the words fake news came billowing throughout the social network. He proclaimed that those white supremacists and neo-Nazi in Charlottesville were “good people.” And a new war on truth was born…again.

That brings me to two truth tellers and their recent testimonies to what really happened to them and to the world from which they came.

Madeleine Albright and Michelle Obama come from different generations and different continents; however, both have much in common: notably, overcoming virulent hatred stemming from racism. Both spoke their truth with undying patriotism to the United States: Ms. Albright on the international stage as “Madam Secretary” and Ms. Obama on a national stage from the White House — a house slaves built (her ancestors to be unambiguous).

These two women have a message for Americans. Beware. Ignorance is not bliss. There is no such thing as alternate facts; events happened or did not happen. Words were said. Actions were taken in churches, mosques, and on the streets of Charlottesville. Mr. Trump’s litany of bullying tactics and ignorance ranged from claiming Mexicans were murders and rapists; Hispanic federal judges could not render justice; Muslims needed to be banned from entering our nation (because he saw them celebrating in New York after 9.11); Africans would never want to go back to their shithole countries’; Trump claims he had no knowledge of David Duke (the Grand Dragon of the KKK); and anyone who contradicted his opinions were merely echoing fake news.

Madeleine Albright’s newest memoir Fascism: A Warning is both a history discourse of villains, who wrap themselves in the cloak of nationalists, but her story concerns her own persecution from her native Czechoslovakia. Whether she is writing about her homeland, Russia, Turkey, the constellations of smaller satellites that once formed the USSR, or the less developed nations dotting South America, as well as the Middle East, Albright is clear how political corruption and vicious manipulation has led to dictators like those in Syria, North Korea and the Philippines to name but a few.

Ms. Albright’s most poignant metaphor deals with the attempt to burn to the ground the ethnic hatred that fed the fascism that shrouded the world’s landscape which the Axis powers coveted. After WWII ended, she argues that the ideology of hate seemed to be scorched on the earth’s surface; however, the roots of paranoia run so deep that after a generation those very seeds begin to break through the crusty soil. President Truman, she notes, spoke of this, “Hitler is finished, but the seeds spread by his disordered mind have firm root in too many fanatical brains.” Her warning is that those ideologies are not only growing, rather they are in full bloom today. One needs only to look to the tragedy in New Zealand this March to see this on horrific display.

Albright contends, Donald Trump is the latest manifestation of how today’s dictators operate. They begin, as Hitler and Mussolini did, by stoking the ambers of fear and discontent among their masses, then slowly they neuter the media and control public discourse. The judicial system is co-opted or maligned. Any challengers are bullied, and in the case of the worst of the monsters — imprisoned, made to mysteriously disappear, or simply boldly assassinated even within embassies existing for their protection. These so-called presidents have one refrain: they claim that they alone can save their nation from the invasion of those who seek to do harm.

Ms. Obama’s memoir is not a warning — far from it — it is clearly a Becoming. She passionately writes of the love of her parents, her upbringing on the Southside, her dedication to a cause worth fighting for and eventually meeting a man of such capability and ambition that she decides to take a road she feels is wicked and wondrous: politics. Naturally, her concerns about her children being raised in such a world worries her greatly, and make no mistake, she does give witness to the dangers of being the first Black family to lead our nation. The peril her family faces equates to the constant security essential to protect her family and the President. From what you may ask? From the same bigoted adversaries who have never let go of the Original Sin of racism. Something this nation has failed to fully come to accept, and from which it has never made reparations.

Ms. Obama’s most telling moment to me was the description of the bullet lodged in the impenetrable window of the First Family’s upstairs living area in the White House. However, bulletproof glass could not stop Donald Trump, whom she can “never forgive” for the danger he so thoughtlessly created, since then candidate Obama was under Secret Service protection far before others because death threats were ubiquitous. Trump’s ignorant insistence that Barack Obama was not born in America created countless malevolent conspiracies all cordoned off under the umbrella of birtherism. Trump, along with his dutiful messengers at Fox News, conjured a sick lie that put the Obama’s in harm’s way.

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In the years before it became obvious what Adolph Hitler’s plans of genocide were, many Germans and Austrians claimed that they never imagined such a thing was happening. 

The antidote is knowledge. Some of it first-hand, eyewitness truth, but for those sitting far from imminent danger in their homes today that knowledge comes from the journalists who cover the events unfolding before them.

However, the campaign of misinformation, whether it comes from foreign adversaries or home-grown propaganda, is real and threatens our republic and the civic discourse that makes America the “beacon of freedom.”

Above all, Michelle Obama and Madeleine Albright are optimists, but they remind the reader that turning a blind eye to the evil in the world does a free society great harm. These two women’s