No defending collusion
Like 1940, the 2016 election showed U.S. vulnerability
Agrowing number of Trump supporters are now saying it was actually good that Russia intervened in our elections, including collusion, if it got Trump elected. To this thinking, getting help from the Russian military and FSB is no different than hiring a consulting firm to do opposition research, only they’re offshore.
It’s not, but how to explain how crazily wrong that is?
Let’s put it this way: What if Nazi Germany did it? How would the eager apologists respond if it was the monstrous regime that murdered millions? The regime that the Greatest Generation defeated? What if Hitler’s Germany rigged an American presidential election and, in effect, took over a significant part of our government?
That’s not a hypothetical scenario, because in fact, Nazi Germany did. Or, at least, tried.
Historians have learned that in the Spring and Summer of 1940, over a year and a half before Pearl Harbor, Nazi Germany sent $5 million to the U.S. to block President Franklin Roosevelt’s renomination and reelection. This was an enormous sum coming out of the Great Depression, the cost of 100 Spitfire fighter planes. At one point, $160,000 was spent just to bribe the 39 members of the Pennsylvania delegation to the Democratic National Convention to not vote for Roosevelt. That $4,000 per delegate would’ve then bought a mansion in a prestigious suburban neighborhood. By comparison, the entire British Secret Intelligence Service in 1939 was only budgeted a mere 700,000 pounds, or about $2.8 million.
Hans Thomsen, the German chargé d’affairs in Washington, asked Berlin for permission to cease keeping records of how this huge sum was being spent. It was granted. That’s because Nazis knew if what they were doing was exposed, an explosion of public outrage would occur, with the likely result of an American entry into World War II. Thomsen and his Nazi bosses fully understood what they were doing was an act of war.
Like the Russian intervention in 2016, we don’t know the full story of what happened in 1940, and given the distance we will likely never know. But the fact that we don’t know everything does not mean we don’t know enough, and should not deter us from understanding the seriousness of what happened in both 1940 and 2016.
Viewed through this lens — asking what if Hitler had done it — I think it’s obvious Russian intervention and American collusion becomes impossible to defend. Years ago when I began working on my novel, “New York Station,” based on this largely forgotten Nazi effort, I was attracted to this episode because I was deeply worried about the vulnerability of our election systems. As the hero of my story says, “why bother with tanks and planes if you can hijack someone else’s elections? What’s the difference? Either way you’re taken over.” But I never expected anything so eerily similar.
Like Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Nazis probably didn’t actually expect to take over the country. Disruption was the goal, to keep America isolated until it was too late. Similarly, Putin wants to shove the U.S. back into isolation. That would give him a free hand to undermine democracies, which, by their very existence, threaten his regime by presenting an alternative he fears and loathes. Democracies, merely by existing, threaten him and regimes like his, and always will. That teaches us not to take our democracy for granted. Attacks on democracy and our elections — which is what democracy is all about — will remain under threat as long as democratic nations, and those who fear them, exist.
The fact that we don’t know everything does not mean we don’t know enough, and should not deter us from understanding the seriousness of what happened in both 1940 and 2016.
Lawrence Dudley, of Glens Falls, is the author of “New York Station,” a political espionage novel set partly in Saratoga Springs. He formerly wrote for The Saratogian, and worked as a political campaign manager. www. lawrencedudley.com.