“Where They Burn Books, They Will, In The End, Burn Human Beings Too.”Henrich Heine
It’s a good bet the in-the-name-of-the-Almighty Missouri politica never read the works of Christian Johann Heinrich Heine, considered on the most significant German Romantic poets.
Born into a family of assimilated German Jews in 1797, he was excluded – because he was a Jew - from lecturer positions in German universities. After earning a law degree in 1825, he converted from Judaism to Protestantism, describing his conversion as “the ticket of admission into European culture” and spent much of his life wrestling with the conflict between German antisemitism and his Jewish identity. He abandoned Germany for Paris in 1831; four years later German authorities banned his works and those of other authors from Young Germany – a social reform and literary movement (c. 1830-1850).
More than one-hundred years after Heine settled in Paris, on May 10, 1933, German Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels addressed a mob of 40,000 people in the Berlin Opernplatz:
“The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end… the future German man will not be just a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you… And thus you will do well in this midnight hour to commit to flames the evil spirit of the past….”
That night, students in 34 university towns across Germany gave Nazi salutes and burned over 25,000 books, including the works of Jewish intellectuals like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud and American authors Ernest Hemingway and Helen Keller.
Newspapers across the country called the “Action against Un-German Spirit” a success; the Nazi war on “un-German” thought and expression had begun.
The night before Goebbel’s heated oratory, American author Helen Keller – who lost sight and hearing to a childhood illness at age nineteen months and learned to communicate, including reading and writing, through the intervention of her teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan – addressed a letter to the German students:
"History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them. You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds."
We can only surmise from her behaviors and public statements that the Missouri would-be politician either skipped history classes at Central Connecticut State University and during her graduate studies at the Tulane Freman School of Business or…
Actually, we can’t think of an or…
[In kindness to her family and because of the profanity and un-Christlike hatred of LGBTQ people she spewed on social media, we will not use her name.]
The now uncandidate promoted herself with a campaign video holding – and using – a flamethrower while declaring, “This is what I will do to the grooming books when I become Secretary of State.” In the video, she then destroyed (apparently) public property while flaming two books and declaring, “These books [are] from a public library. When I’m in office, they will burn.” [“they will burn”? She was already incinerating them.]
In an X post, she declared “DEI, LGBTQ and Critical Race Theory ends the second I get into office.” During a campaign rally, the “self-made millionaire,” promised, “I’m gonna defund all the libraries that are having LGBTQ, DEI, Critical Race Theory material in the children’s section.” [The role for which she was campaigning, Missouri Secretary of State, does not control funding for libraries; local libraries are primarily funded at the local level, with their own library boards making taxing decisions.] In an X video, the vocal opponent of illegal immigration asserted, “Many of them are sleeper agents that will act against the public.”
Even before the Missouri primary, the Meidas News Network (June 3, 2024) reported the candidate stood outside a Nestle Purina office and claimed she was “fired” by the company, which she listed as her employer on her LinkedIn site. She claimed her employer tried to quiet her about attacking LGBT books in libraries after the flamethrower video. The candidate implied that Nestle Purina was pro-pedophiles and grooming, a popular claim of members the campaign of the 45th President of the United States. In June, her campaign website described her as “a real estate investor, financier, strategist….”
She urged her followers to “Feed your dog something that is not weak and gay.” Firing was not the only bad news for the 25-year-old candidate. She also received a cease-and-desist letter from Sony and a rebuke from Pit Viper eyewear for using their music and eyewear in her homophobic campaign ads. She frequently refers to anything she does not like as “weak and gay” and asserted that the Kansas City Chiefs team is joining her campaign against everything “weak and gay.”
The now former candidate has claimed a direct line of communication with the Almighty: “I was a nobody and God transformed me into one of the most feared, respected, and loved women in American politics.”
She also asserted that she had “made history in the name of Jesus Christ. I put the fear of God in pedophiles, groomers, and corrupt politicians. I never sold out, spoke the truth, and did the right thing for the American people.”
Wow! The Creator of the Universe, Supreme Being, Almighty backed the sixth-place finisher in a field of eight. She garnered just 7.2% of 643,450 votes.
Which proves…
Either the Omniscient Divine is really lousy at handicapping political races…
Or the Good Lord doesn’t pick and choose winners and losers.
But it’s possible that there is another lesson to be learned.
Helen Keller’s letter to German students, May 9, 1933.
While a student at the Lutheran Newberry College, Lee Atwater served an internship in the Washington office of segregationist U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond. With a master’s degree in communication from the University of South Carolina and after serving as chair of the South Carolina branch of the College Republicans, he opened a political consulting firm in Columbia and began his descent into “dirty tricks” politics. In 1978, he portrayed Thurmond’s Democratic opponent as disloyal to their home state and someone who would be more comfortable in New York. Thurmond won in a landslde.
Two years later, he falsely claimed George H.W. Bush was a strong supporter of gun control, helping Ronald Reagan win the Republican primary in South Carolina, propelling himself into the role of Reagan’s Southern campaign coordinator. He also described Tom Turnipseed, Democratic candidate for South Carolina’s 2nd congressional district who had received electroconvulsive therapy, as having been “hooked up to jumper cables.”
The master of “dirty tricks, followed Reagan into the White House as deputy political director and, in 1984, became the deputy manager of Reagan’s reelection campaign.
As George W. Bush’s campaign director during the 1988 presidential race, working with a rogues gallery that included Karl Rove, Paul Manafort, Roger Stones and others, he initiated a notorious attack on Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, claiming Dukakis was responsible for the rape of a white women by a Black inmate, Willie Sutton, while on a weekend furlough. (Dukakis had vetoed legislation that would have denied furlough to persons convicted of first-degree murder.) Atwater pounded Dukakis with “Willie Horton,” consistently claiming Dukakis was “soft on crime.”
“In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said that I ‘would strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his running mate,” Atwater wrote years later. The racist fear mongering contributed to Bush’s victory and transformed presidential politics in the United States.
On March 5, 1990, while addressing a Republican fundraiser:
"I felt my left foot start to shake uncontrollably. In seconds the twitch had moved into my leg and up the left side of my body. I was scared. I stopped speaking, grabbed at my side with one hand and clutched the podium with the other."
Within days, Atwater was diagnosed with a tumor on the right side of his brain. Despite his power and connections, despite all the research and searches for a cure by his friends and associates, “… on March 21, we hit bottom,” he said in an extensive interview with Life magazine.
"The doctors still won't answer that nagging question of mine: How long do I have? Three weeks. Three months. Three years.
"I try to live as if I have at least three years, but some nights I can't go to sleep, so fearful am I that I will never wake up again."
From his deathbed, Atwater began an apology tour of letters and phone calls, including to Dukakis and Turnipseed.
During what was essentially a deathbed interview and mea culpa, Atwater told Life magazine (February 1991):
“My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul....I was wrong to follow the meanness of Conservatism. I should have been trying to help people instead of taking advantage of them. I don't hate anyone anymore. For the first time in my life I don't hate somebody. I have nothing but good feelings toward people. I've found Jesus Christ – It's that simple. He's made a difference.”
Known as “the Boogie Man,” Lee Atwater died on March 29, 1991. By reports, he had converted to Roman Catholicism, but was buried in an Episcopal Church. Writing in The New York Times Magazine in 1993, Maureen Dowd reported:
“His friends say Atwater was not at peace when he died. He was frightened, slipping in and out of lucidity, dictating an anecdotal autobiography, lurching from Catholicism to Judaism to Buddhism to crystals. He went from bloated to emaciated, his hands like toothpicks, black and withered, his face like that of an 80-year-old man, charcoal circles under his eyes…
“’It was not a true conversion but just the best calculation he could make to settle old scores because he was scared,’ said a close friend. "’’Lee was spinning his own death.’"
Months after his death (November 4, 1991), New York Magazine profiled Atwater and quoted him extensively:
“Long before I was struck with cancer, I felt something stirring in American society. It was a sense among the people of the country… that something was missing from their lives, something crucial. I was trying to position the Republican party to take advantage of it. But I wasn’t sure what ‘it’ was. My illness helped me see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood.
“The 1980’s were about acquiring – acquiring wealth, power, prestige…. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty…. I don’t know who will lead us through the nineties, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.”
It’s not our role to forgive the Missouri candidate. She’s only 25-years-old and, despite her Tulane MBA in Finance and Management, she might have a great deal of growing yet to do. Perhaps she might learn from Lee Atwater, who was just about her age when he began his dirty tricks.
We’ll pray for her and her victims.