Tyranny is a term recently heard quite a bit in the public square … and for good reason.
When America’s “leaders” attempt to retain their power by weaponizing law enforcement to attack their ideological enemies, that is irrefutable evidence that tyranny’s ugly face has made an appearance. Indeed, it is the only consequence possible when any political state is allowed to denigrate the Rule of Law in favor of the Rule of Man. Consider the message of Biden’s “red wall” speech coupled withthe Mar-a-Lago raid, theL eticia James witch hunt, our government’s shameful treatment of the J’6ers and the now infamous FBI early morning raids of MAGA Supporters.
The good news is this cultural malignancy has been detected by patriotic Americans in its early stages, and thus, it remains curable. But, cured it must be and now. Actually, it is our duty to do so before it metastasizes into a fatal stage 4 cultural cancer that could kill millions, as the competing tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin amply demonstrated.
To fully appreciate all that is at stake for us today, consider the past through the lens of my late neighbor, Wolf, who learned early in life that whenever a government is no longer constrained to consider all men to be equal in the sight of God, those who are held to be less equal will soon find themselves having no rights.
Born in Lodz, Poland in 1914, his introduction to this concept began with the pogroms that occurred periodically there throughout his youth, and which lasted sometimes for days on end. Aside from the beatings and destruction of property he experienced, he was also left with the indelible memory of the police in Lodz standing by and doing nothing to stop the violence they were watching. Such were the rights of those the government had decided were to be treated unequally.
Next, entered the Germans, now led by a tyrant who, in the beginning of his rise to unbridled power, had been allowed by his people to disregard any concept of the assumed equality of all in the sight of either God or the Law. He declared himself sole arbiter and judge to designate which particular domestic groups within his country were to be considered the enemies of all “good” Germans, much like Biden did with MAGA supporters in his “red wall” speech. It was in this same way that Hitler justified his methodical persecution and purging of his ideological enemies—a modus operandi to ensure that the power he held over all his countrymen would both become, and thereafter remain, absolute.
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Sadly, for mankind, however, power is a lot like money—no matter how much one acquires, it is never enough. Once Hitler’s tyranny had been allowed by the German people to metastasize to stage 4 in the first six years of his reign, he felt confident to squeeze the goose to expand that power by deciding unilaterally to attack Poland in 1939. To which the Polish government responded by ordering all men between 18 and 55—whether Jewish or not—to rush to the defense of Warsaw, all while failing to provide any transportation for them to get there. So, at the age of 25, Wolf joined his friends and started a three-day journey by foot that only he would survive to tell about.
While being strafed by German planes as others were dropping bombs on them, one of them blew Wolf into a ditch beside the road, where he remained unconscious while all his fellow travelers were killed. Even so, when he awoke, he gathered his wits and continued to Warsaw, only to be captured by the Germans and placed in a hastily setup camp nearby where unbearable cruelty, humiliation and hunger quickly became the order of each day. Soon thereafter, however, providence again struck, and Wolf was able to escape, but only to discover that the Germans had imposed a 5:00 p.m. curfew throughout the country coupled with an order that anyone found in violation was to be summarily shot.
Ironically, it was during this flight from the Germans that Wolf discovered that human nature also had a better side. Strangers he would never again see risked not only their lives, but sometimes the lives of their entire families, to hide him, feed him and guide him along each leg of his perilous journey back to Lodz. Without them, he knew then that he would never have been able to say goodbye to his family before continuing to Russia to complete his escape from the Nazis. Upon leaving Lodz, however, the two things he did not know then were that: he would never again see his family alive; and by going to Russia, he was placing his fate in the claws of another tyranny that was every bit as evil as the tyranny he was fleeing.
Instead of being allowed to join the Russian army to fight Germans, as he had imagined, they immediately captured him and placed him with 80 or so other prisoners in a small room with no bathroom for several weeks. The filth nearly overwhelmed him before he was eventually relocated to a Russian work—i.e., slave—camp that was equally dismal. Of the 1,500 in this first camp, he estimated that only 750 survived prior to his being transported to yet another camp where the Russians were in need of slave labor.
And so it went for Wolf over the next two or three years. Eventually, however, he was allowed to “settle” in a camp in Siberia where he was “permitted” to use his tailoring skills to make prison clothes for the remainder of the war.
When the war finally ended, Stalin’s government announced throughout Siberia that any Poles desiring to return to their homeland would be transported by train at the government’s expense, provided that they act quickly to get to the nearest station and grab a seat while they lasted.
Not trusting Stalin or his government, Wolf declined, and chose instead to make his own way beyond Stalin’s Iron Curtain as best he could—at minimum, a dangerous journey involving many risks of its own. (See the firsthand account of such dangers by Mila Mitrovich entitled: We Escaped Through A Mouse Hole In The Iron Curtain.)
Even so, in the end, Wolf learned his intuition had been correct. He eventually made his way to Paris, only to learn from others along the way that most of the thousands of Poles who had taken Stalin up on his offer of a free train ride were transported instead to remote places throughout Russia and murdered by Russian troops. Whereas, by contrast, after several years in France, Wolf was again blessed with the privilege of lawfully immigrating again to the nation he and the rest of the world considered to be …the land of the free.
The question stories like Wolf’s should leave us with today is whether our generation will have the courage to do all that is necessary for the United States of America to remain free? Or will we do nothing to restore the Rule of Law and permit the tyranny we are now witnessing in America to become stronger and permanently take hold?
The choice we make could very well determine whether this telling of Wolf’s past will be nothing less than a possible foretelling of our future.
Cliff Nichols is an attorney, the author of A Barrister’s Tales, the curator of The American Landscape and the drafter of The Declaration of Liberty.
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