“Live Not By Lies”
What is the “point” of the ongoing impeachment trial of Donald Trump, many people are asking, with an understandable combination of cynicism and despair. There are 50 Republican senators, of whom 17 would have to vote along with all 50 Democratic senators to convict Trump, so that a subsequent, simple-majority vote could be taken to ban him from ever holding federal office again. It seems impossible that this bar will be met, since only five Republican senators could be mustered to vote in favor of the trial’s constitutionality. Without the two-thirds majority mandated by the Constitution, Trump will be acquitted, yet again to escaping consequences for his criminal and antidemocratic behavior, and sending a powerful signal of impunity both for himself and for other aspiring American fascist dictators, some of whom sit in that selfsame Senate (Cruz, Hawley, etc.).
There are two answers to that. Politically speaking, the alternative of not bothering to impeach Trump for attempting a violent coup to overthrow the American republic would have been even worse than an acquittal may be, because it would send the same signal of impunity for Trump, and the additionally damaging message that no one dared even try to hold him to account. Holding this trial and showing those video clips of the January 6 putsch attempt makes plain for all to see the undeniable link between Trump urging the mob to “fight like hell” and that same mob, just minutes later, chanting “fight for Trump!” as they swarm the Capitol Building baying for blood. Yes, most Republican Senators will claim they don’t see the link and will vote to acquit, but their bad faith will also be plain for the world to see, and will speed up the ongoing disintegration of a once-great democratic political party that is now a vehicle for fascism. Who knows how many ordinary Republican voters out there will no longer be able to quiet their consciences, and will quit the party in disgust?
Even more important will be the moral effect of five or more Republican Senators voting to convict Trump. This lesson is drawn from the long, agonizing, twilight struggle to defeat the monstrous lie of Soviet Communism, a vital part of which took place within the Soviet empire itself. Every deed done, every word written or spoken by what were called “dissidents,” was a mortal threat to the Soviet authorities, who understood and treated them as such. Yet the world knew, or soon came to know, of the poet Osip Mandelstam’s protest poem against Stalin (“his cockroach whiskers leer”), which began to tear down the murderer’s mystique; of the heroic resistance of East Germans in 1953, Hungarians in 1956, and Czechs in 1968, and the tiny demonstration in support of the latter in Red Square itself; of the struggle of Jewish dissidents to be free; and on and on.
The Soviet authorities tried to poison one of the greatest dissidents of all, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and then exiled him from the country, for pulling back the curtain of lies they had draped over their massive crimes. He was not deterred. “Live not by lies,” he urged his fellow Russians in his most famous essay in 1974, just before they kicked him out: “Let us each make a choice: whether to remain consciously a servant of falsehood … or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect from one’s children and contemporaries.”
We must not give in to the despair caused by the flood of lies in contemporary America, regardless of whether they are known by such modish names as “alternative facts” or “fake news.” The truth will defeat them in the end; and each act of resistance brings the day of victory closer.