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On the Pathos and Futility of Resistance

Photo courtesy of Fred Baumgarten.

That’s me on the left in the burgundy coat holding up a pathetic little homemade antiwar sign at a rally in Albany, New York, the capital of one of our fifty United States. There were perhaps 75 of us standing on a little street corner holding signs and chanting the usual slogans as temperatures dropped along with the late afternoon sun. A lot of drivers going by honked their horns in solidarity. I tried to give them all the thumbs-up. A few showed us the middle finger instead.

“We want justice. You say how? Stop bombing Iran now!”

I guess I should be a little grateful that we were allowed by the powers that be to protest and had no encounters with ICE or the police, shouldn’t I? Whatever.

At this stage in the rise of Nazi Germany, any such protests would no doubt have been impossible or met by killing force. Nevertheless, I found myself wondering if this is what it felt like to be a German citizen when Hitler launched his “Blitzkrieg” on Poland to start WWII. Like those MAGA bird-flippers, some percentage of the populace surely supported their Führer and his aggression. But how utterly powerless those Germans who opposed Hitler and the war must have felt! And then there were those who, like Sophie Scholl, willingly sacrificed their lives to carry resistance as far as they could. We have had a few of them, such as Aaron Bushnell. I would count Keith Porter Jr., Alex Pretti, and Renee Good, too, although their lives were taken in the domestic war our government is waging on its own citizens. That’s not too different from Nazi Germany either, is it?

It hardly seems worth rehashing the parallels between 1939 and 2026. I have written about the similarities in two articles previously, and everything I predicted would happen after has come true: an autocrat running the country, starting wars unilaterally, killing and rounding up people of less-favored status and political opposition on the streets. I don’t say that to boast, only to reinforce how closely the Trump regime has tracked to the Third Reich. Some people still insist on gaslighting us, trying to convince us that now is not exactly the same as then. Will a truly apocalyptic WWIII break out? Maybe not, but no one ever said this is 1939, only that the processes and events unfolding all have direct parallels. War is now fought with missiles, aircraft, and drones, of course, and the destruction is swifter and more complete, unless you count Dresden, Tokyo, and the atomic bombs – oh, wait, we only need to look at Gaza to see the modern version of those. Last I checked, we were doing a full Dresden to Tehran as I write this.

Anyway. Our “government” has gone far, far beyond the point of caring what its citizens think one way or the other. It wouldn’t matter if a hundred protesters showed up in Albany or a million thronged Washington, D.C. We stand helpless in the face of an authoritarian regime gone berserk. The only language that matters is power. Like growing numbers of Americans, my last, best hope is that the belligerent forces of the U.S. military experience a total and blistering rebuke. I’m not holding my breath.

Fred Baumgarten is a writer living in upstate New York.

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