‘Hello darkness, my old friend’

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A thought for a Sunday column always seems to arrive at the strangest hour of the day.

For instance, the other morning I was up early and found myself watching an old Charles Laughton movie, "The Land is Mine," on Turner Classic Movies.

It was a story about the Nazi occupation of some European town and how that community was destroyed by a threatening Nazi regiment. Citizens were lined up and shot, and the town’s democracy was sacrificed at the altar.

Lloyd "Pete" Waters
Lloyd "Pete" Waters

Laughton played a school teacher, Albert Lory, and Maureen O’Hara, another teacher named Louise Martin, was his love interest.

Laughton was presented as a coward throughout the story and was later arrested for allegedly killing a Nazi sympathizer who actually had died by suicide.

At the end of the movie, Laughton’s character was found not guilty by a jury of locals after he gave an eloquent speech on what the Nazis were doing to his town and the entire world.

The people’s freedoms were being destroyed by a power-lusting dictator, suggested this mild-mannered teacher.

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Many of his fellow citizens had sold their souls to these invaders out of fear, he said.

Individual freedoms would soon disappear under the soldiers’ occupation.

After being found not guilty of murder, Laughton’s character returned to the classroom, and in the final scene, was reading to his students America’s Declaration of Independence, which speaks about those gifts of freedom.

Nazi soldiers then arrive to arrest and escort him to a courtyard where he would be later shot and silenced forever.

There is no place for opposition to a dictator.

As I watched this film, which was made in 1943, I sat in my chair and thought of a recent image shared by a friend of mine on her Facebook page the previous day.

It was a troubling image that showed Russian President Vladimir Putin glaring out from a train window into the darkness of night. And there from that same window outside staring back was a reflection of Adolf Hitler.

A chilling title, "Hello Darkness, My Old Friend," accompanied the image.

It was two gazing dictators, with expressions of sordid delight as they, perhaps, considered the number of deaths and destruction they had inflicted across humanity’s landscape.

As I studied that picture, I searched online for the song "The Sound of Silence," not the version by Simon and Garfunkel, but another by Disturbed. And I sat there, blackberry libation in hand, gazing at the scene and listening to that song.

The lyrics and images delivered a most sobering moment:

Hello darkness, my old friend

I’ve come to talk to you again

Because a vision softly creeping

Left its seeds while I was sleeping

And the vision that was planted in my brain

Still remains

Within the sound of silence

As I mentally visualized those murdered children with missing limbs like broken dolls, and mothers, fathers and grandparents lying dead in the debris of those bombed out Ukraine buildings, I thought of these two dictators and their inflicted carnage.

It was a difficult moment for me as I imagined Putin on that train ride that night whispering, "Hello darkness, my old friend," to another savage just like himself.

As I thought about Hitler and Putin, I considered other evil slayers of mankind down through the ages.

Consider Genghis Khan, Mongol ruler from 1206 to 1227, who slaughtered civilians en mass as he set out to conquer the world and create the Silk Road.

Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet Russian leader from 1917 to 1924, who led the October Revolution overthrowing the czar and perhaps killing an estimated 3 million of his own countrymen.

And then there was Hitler, führer of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, who dreamed of a master race that culminated in the deaths of 11 million noncombatants during World War II, at least 6 million of them Jews.

Joseph Stalin, another Soviet leader from 1922 to 1953, who ruthlessly ruled in the 1930s and was suspected of killing as many as 20 million Russians during his reign.

Both Lenin and Stalin were heroes to Mao Zedong who had his own torrid history in China while ruling from 1949 to 1976. Mao’s policies, too, led to perhaps 30 million deaths from mass starvation, forced labor camps and executions.

The roles of dictators are well documented throughout our world’s history, and with each new century, their tools of war become more lethal and catastrophic.

Nuclear bombs and chemical arsenals are now the arms of several radical despots.

The world has become a complicated place, and those tyrants who hunger for more power today have an insatiable appetite for conquest, just like their peers of yesterday.

And perhaps even today, these same tyrants whisper into the night:

Hello darkness, my old friend.

Pete Waters is a Sharpsburg resident who writes for The Herald-Mail.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Dictators past and present embrace the darkness as an old friend