My Take: One of history’s mysteries is how easily a few evil humans destroyed nations

I sincerely enjoyed Lynn Smith’s excellent article “Cowards, crooks, and crazies” (Aug. 14). However, I believe it is also essential for people to understand the tactics these “Cowards, Crooks, and Crazies,” and those who exploit them, use to obtain power.

Although I agree that the term “fascism” is often overused to condemn those with differing political beliefs (since this can serve to minimize the severity of the horrors this word conveys), America would be remiss if it forgets that people like Adolf Hitler were not created in a vacuum.

Hitler and his enablers realized that, to create a fascist government, numbers were not required. The Nazi party, after all, only won 43% of the popular vote.

More:Lynn Smith: Cowards, crooks, and crazies

What is required is the exploitation of the human tendency to vocally complain about real or perceived wrongs, but to remain silent when content.

Thus, through the vociferous use of harassment, intimidation, censorship, threats and even physical violence, a vocal fascist minority can dominate. This is especially true on the state or local government levels, where officials might not have the available resources for adequate security, and thus they either capitulate or simply vacate their positions, leaving them to then be occupied by the purveyors of these threats and/or their supporters.

Once a cultish leader is empowered, he or she then creates a fascist milieu by trumpeting the use of emotion over reason. As Hitler wrote, “The driving force of the most important changes in this world had been found less in scientific knowledge animating the masses but rather in a fanaticism dominating them and in a hysteria which drives them forward.”

This fanaticism, in turn, instills “belief perseverance” in a fascist leader’s followers that even contrary factual evidence often cannot shatter.

Once belief perseverance has been established, the psychological and sociological tools of fascism are unleashed. These include, but are not limited to, scapegoating; appeals to racial, religious, gender, and/or ethnic hatreds and fears, frequently disguised as “patriotism,” “liberty,” or “religion”; and the “great lie theory.”

Scapegoating’s power resides in the reality that there is always a plethora of people or ideas to blame and/or demonize. Two common scapegoats in today’s America, for example, are the vaguely defined terms “Wokeness” and “Critical Race Theory.” This vagueness is intentional, because it provides cultish leaders with the power to affix these terms to any ideas they perceive as a threat to their power. When the “elimination” of one scapegoat does not produce the promised utopia, such leaders simply create another.

A recent example of this is Donald Trump’s ever-shifting excuses and blame for why and/or how secret government documents ended up in his home.

Secondly, it is a poorly kept secret that politicians incessantly win elections not by appealing to the best in human nature, but to the worse, which makes the exploitation of racial, ethnic, gender or religious bigotry particularly potent.

In the past the impact of these appeals was largely achieved through the use of code words and symbols. Today, however, this has shifted, meaning that numerous politicians and pundits are now perfectly comfortable openly saying and displaying what these code words and symbols simply used to imply.

Finally, there is the “great lie theory.” This theory thrives not on veracity, but presentation. Fascist leaders understand that their followers will unquestioningly believe everything they are told, provided these leaders reduce their “great lies” to convenient slogans, which, when incessantly repeated, can, as Hitler contended, “make people believe that heaven is hell — and hell heaven.”

This theory also thrives upon ignorance, which is why fascists so zealously engage in figurative and literal book burnings and attacks on education. The Achilles Heel of the “great lie theory” is knowledge, because knowledge inspires people to think, to research, and to question, which is anathema to the obsequious obedience needed for the embrace of “great lies.”

If you even rudimentarily examine the governments of several states today, and the potential direction America is moving, it is not difficult to “check off the boxes” described above to see how this country is now on the brink of fascism.

One of history’s greatest mysteries is how easily a handful of evil human beings can destroy a nation. Either fundamental virtues like love, compassion, tolerance, understanding, and reason must soon prevail, or this will be humanity’s epitaph: “Dedicated to the extinct human race. Never before was there a species better equipped to prevent its demise, nor one more deserving of it.”

— David R. Hoffman is a retired civil rights and constitutional law attorney. He resides in South Bend, Ind.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: My Take: One of history’s mysteries is how easily a few evil humans destroyed nations