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On The Edge Of Darkness In A Mortal Storm [1]
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Date: 2025-03-04
Four score and nearly one year ago, the American soldier in the edge of the surf above, landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France. Frank Capa with “Company E” , the only photographer there with the first wave that morning, took his photograph. Both of them, and all the Americans landing at Omaha, were under murderous gunfire and shelling from the Nazi German defenders trying to stop them. Capa somehow managed to survive that June 6, 1944, “D-Day” Invasion. The soldier he saw in his lens, no one knows his fate, nor his certain identity. Over 2,500 Americans lost their lives that day, as did nearly 2,000 of our allies who landed in Normandy on different beaches. Many of them are buried in France. Some were never found. Thousands more were wounded.
It is likely that he, and most of those there that June morning, fighting their way in as the wounded and dead rolled in the waves and lay on the sand and in and on the fighting vehicles they landed with and the obstacles emplaced to thwart them, had never heard of Normandy, France, a few months or even a few days before then. They were all there because well over a decade earlier, the evil and racist malicious ideology of an Austrian man, relentlessly infected fanatical followers. Appointed the German Chancelor then seizing total dictatorial political authority in the powerful nation of Germany in early 1933, Adolph Hitler marshaled German national industrial resources and it’s manpower into a military force that, under his control and direction, violently invaded and brutally occupied numerous other European nations. In his own adopted nation of Germany he ruled with fear, brutality, and murder, as he enriched his closest followers with power and money. But, this is not only a story about the past. It is a consideration of the present, and why we must fight approaching darkness as we modern American mortals, inheritors of a democratic republic created by a written Declaration signed by fifty six men, many of whom died or were destroyed subsequent to their signatures on that parchment, face the edge of a darkening uncertain future.
My father, who passed away many years ago when I was a younger man, was not at Normandy. He was, however, in those mid-1940’s years, first in the US Merchant Marine in the Pacific Theater, and after that in the US Army in Europe, where he was a Counter Intelligence Corps junior officer in Italy and Austria in 1945 and 1946. My immigrant Grandfather, who died when my Dad was only seventeen in the Veteran’s Hospital at Fort Snelling in Minnesota, and who is buried at Fort Snelling National Cemetery in Minneapolis, served with the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, in France in 1918. My family believed he suffered, as my Dad and Aunt grew up in Minneapolis while he was hospitalized for a dozen years, from lung disease related to his exposure to German mustard gas in France. It is because of them, and those Americans on Omaha Beach, and all the other Americans who have sacrificed their years and their health and their lives in our long history, that I decided to write this, in my disgust and abhorrence of our current national political circumstances and trajectory.
I can’t predict the future. I grew up in the Midwest, however, and my childhood taught me that ominous dark clouds and lightning in the skies, meant a storm was coming my direction. For our country, that is what is happening now I fear. How big and bad it will be, what will be damaged or lost, or even if I will be alive still when it gets here, I don’t know. Thunder is rumbling, and the wind is growing and every day seems darker, to continue my analogy. But I think I do know something. And that is, that critical decisions will likely have to be made, and likely risky actions undertaken, as our country is threatened with ideologies and choices that neither my Grandfather, nor my Father, nor the soldier in Capa’s lens and all the other scared but determined Americans on Omaha Beach, wanted to come to the United States. This time, however, the threat is from inside our own nation. Others, when my Dad and Grandfather were alive, in different times and places, found themselves in similar circumstances that although the details differed, required similar fraught decisions and uncertain-outcome determined actions, that many of us living today may similarly experience. I think should be thinking about things to come.
I love watching, when I can, old movies from the 1930’s and 1940’s. For many reasons. I have always read history since I was a kid, and although books are unsurpassed, film storytelling became the dominant medium of societal culture expression and reflection a century ago, and it still is. Not only American movies, but movies from many countries. These days for me, that means alone late at night, on my small phone. The title of this story is taken from two old Hollywood movies I find extraordinary: ‘The Mortal Storm’ from 1940, and ‘Edge of Darkness’ from 1943. Both of these movies tell fictional but apocryphal stories of people in those years when they were made, witnessing ideologically evil political circumstances engulfing their lives in the former, and experiencing war-necessitated decisions about dangerous considered actions to take or not to take, in the latter. They both do an excellent job of portraying what people think about and do, some good things and some terrible ones also, when political ideologies and events, precipitated by hate-drenched intolerant brutally rigid leaders and their acolytes, overtake their lives. Those circumstances with their existential fate-enshrouded decisions, and those life or death desperate actions, may come to many, if not most or all of us, here, sooner or later. In Ukraine, this is their situation, now.
What to do, or not to do, about all of Trump’s MAGA-justified legal and societal and anti-Constitutional depredations underway in the few weeks since he assumed office, dominate the contributions of the writers and commenters in this forum, but not only here. Who is to blame? The repellent barely victorious winners? Or the surprised bewildered losers? Recriminations toward whoever may have partially caused defeat and are in those regretful crosshairs, are like tiny daggered raindrops falling into a river however, that is already flooding historically high and fast after a never expected but suddenly catastrophically breached internally broken giant headwater dam collapse, sweeping the adjacent banks leaving wreckage all along its’ course. The raindrops add nothing to the engulfing deluge drowning and destroying everything. How long and how much destruction, how many lives will be lost in the turbulence, we don’t know. Casualties are mounting now. But the deaths actually started years ago. In our country, we recall, and the evidence is clear despite far-ranging attempts to squash it’s dissemination, several hundred thousand Americans and others here, died needlessly from calculated Trump-guided MAGA-political decisions and pre-meditated actions and non-actions, justified in a constant fantastical cloud of dis-information abetted by foreign malign perpetrators Trump has always embraced, some targeting blue states and cities, as a result of Trump’s first executive office defiling, when a deadly biological virus overwhelmed the world. This time, is different.
What has happened, so barely far in 2025, portends much worse to come. Trump considers himself a king, he has told everyone in his now infamous gold crown published image. He thinks and states himself he is bound by no laws, because he bellows daily he is saving our country. His continuously vulgarly vilified “enemies of the state” Democratic Party opponents, are his modern-day substitutes for Hitler’s Jewish targets. The federal investigative and prosecutorial agencies, that exist as a bulwark against dictatorial factional power-mongers, rightly feared by ‘The Framers’, who convinced millions of our fellow citizens to support an authoritarian dismantling of democratic institutions, are now headed by Trump’s awful loyal supplicants and mob-mentality enforcers. They owe their positions to their unfathomably pathetically narcissistic sociopathic hate-exuding boss. His fanatical followers threaten their, and their family’s lives, if any deviation from their cult leader’s desires is detected. They are working diligently daily now to suppress anything that might somehow damage Trump, from the pedophile Jeffery Epstein document files, to Trump’s vast and decades-long Russian entanglements, to his theft of classified national security materials, and many others they are vanishing. It is their primary mission, and they were granted their power to do so by elected MAGA-GOP congressional fluffers who truly believe, or are, many of them, too fearful of un-employment and possible un-aliving should they act otherwise.
Compounding this unfolding national and international catastrophe, perpetrated with the approval of well less than 50% of the election voting American population, many of whom are now surprised at their government’s destruction, is the race among many of the wealthiest Americans to display their fealty to Trump’s societal goals. From huge financial inauguration donations, to corporate hiring policy changes, public statements of support, changes to venerable journalism news opinion publishing practices, and smiling appearances at his public events. Trump’s media lawsuits are coercing his corporate targets to capitulate with huge financial settlements. At the same time, Trump is firing top experienced military leaders who protect Americans, to replace them with compliant officers who share his political policy positions and will protect Trump, led by an unqualified Christian Nationalist fanatic whose alcohol-by-volume content should keep him ten feet away from a flickering candle. All of the J6 2020 insurrectionist rioters were fully pardoned, sedition or conspiracy or assaultive violence be damned. An island prison, Guantanamo in Cuba, is being prepped for tens of thousands of new arrivals. And Democratic Party leadership lawmakers are receiving notices of prosecutial investigation for previous public statements deemed “threats” to Republican judges and mega-billionaire MAGA Trump enforcer and securities con-man Elon Musk, the tip of the red-pilled government dismembering spear. All of this as Trump’s administration, closely following the farcically disavowed Project 2025 outline to destroy our form of representative public-serving government, is only six weeks old. To say all this is overwhelming many disheartened and stressed-out non-MAGA swilling Americans, is certain. Myself included. A few Magazies themselves, from scattered reports, have begun to wonder. Well, they are in it now too, up to their red necks.
The 1940 movie ‘The Mortal Storm’, superbly depicts the situation faced by a German family, headed by a Jewish professor, as Nazism infected German society before the Second World War. As many here have these past years described their own Magaism supporting relatives, some, but not all, of this particular mixed ancestry family, come to support Adolph Hitler’s violent racist political party. Over time, its relentless persecutive victim-blaming philosophy is pursued and achieved through increasingly violent actions toward Jews and any non-conformists. Family bonds are broken, family traditions become ominously fraught, conversations are sottovoce, and lives are shattered and lost. Some of the characters decide, despite increasingly great peril every moment, to resist the Nazi societal onslaught bit by bit, privately and then publicly at great risk, until events become so unbearable to them that extreme actions are undertaken, with mortality affecting results.
This film story remains, because of Trump’s Magaism venom-cloud regrettably and unbelievably ascendent now, prophetically relevant to Americans at the start of 2025. The Mortal Storm movie was created and intended when it was released, a short three years fifty weeks and six days, before Frank Capa hit that bloody Normandy beach and found himself close by that American soldier in the waves in a Nazi metal-storm and pointed his camera, to show American audiences across an ocean what the hell was happening in Germany the past few years. It succeeded. But, we should wonder and many of us are in early 2025 with trepidation: What will our nation become in the months and years just ahead? What will the cameras capture then? Will Trump be content to be just a historically average semi-benign dictator? Or, as he always believes and flogs himself to be the best at everything, the most beautiful most ruthless most fanatically determined dictatorial dictator who ever ruled the most militarily powerful nation to ever exist?
Trump seems obsessed to expand his kingly empire. North, South, where else? Will he invade other nations? Will he start to vocally disregard judicially adverse decisions? Will he purposely incite mass public opposition to justify seizing total governmental control through the existing Insurrection Act? Will he, under some justification or other, invoke Martial Law here? Will he shoot growing crowds of protestors with the obedience of his Sec Def Hegseth? Imprison college protestors? Democrats? Anti-Trump conservatives? Or, perhaps, will his seemingly insatiable hunger for the Nobel Peace Prize, and his quest to see his carved-in-to-stone glowering mug-shot visage in the state where his Homeland Security Secretary shot her young dog, curb his worst imaginable instincts? Place your bets. None of us know for sure, but he has surrounded himself with supporters who have previously advocated those actions. I do know that I do not believe that my own Grandfather and my Father, nor the unknown wet American soldier under decimating fire that June 6th, would remain quiescent or compliant in our current national internal threat environment. They risked their mortal lives to defend democratic ideals written and signed and revered for centuries, and they fought the the kind of political existential criminal monstrosities Trump has demonstrated a will to become to us in his second opportunity .
The other movie I referenced, 1943’s ‘’Edge of Darkness’, superbly presents the soul-searching agony of human beings already in the violent grip of ruthless Nazi German occupiers doing their mass-murdering, the ongoing increasing extent of which against European Jews was not widely known then … dictator’s dirty work. The Norwegian fishing community residents are deciding if they can, or even should, try to fight back. The setting is a small coastal village in Norway, with 150 garrisoned heavily armed German soldiers led by a Nazi-supporting fanatic commanding officer, with their boots on the throats of the 800 Norwegians who live there. Hostages from the village have already been murdered as a reprisal by the time their story opens, to coerce obedience to their Nazi plans and ensure the soldier’s safety. Not all of the villagers agree about what they should do. There is distrust toward some of the residents, including especially the cooperating scheming wealthiest resident business owner among them, who owns the only fish cannery in town. Remind you of anyone Trump knows? Maybe many someones? The village people talk about it as days and weeks go on, and their freedoms vanish and their lives diminish with constant overwhelming fear. There are no safe or sure choices without dangerous and maybe catastrophic outcomes. They talk furtively in whispers, wrestle with each other and in their own minds over their circumstances, until some individual leaders coalesce many around a set of actions that might lead to tragedy, because their Norwegian national history and generational spirit of democratic governance, guide their final decisions, and their fateful acts.
We Americans now, may face such choices ourselves. We are already being institutionally ‘occupied’ by malevolent political Trump enforcers, more every day since he lied taking his Oath of Office on January 2oth. Some writers here, and many other non-MAGA cult followers, think we are already facing similar looming choices. That our own ‘Edge of Darkness’ time is nearly upon us in our current still unfolding national evil mortal storm. Some of us, like certain villagers in that fishing village, argue that it is not time for violent resistance yet, and so far, we do not see that happening. Will we? I don’t know. It depends. But all of us Americans who expected a different election outcome than putting the most execrable person to ever occupy our White House in there a second time, now see the earliest depradations already undermining our democracy. Many Americans are losing livelihoods. Healthcare for themselves, or their children. Education for their little ones. Vital drugs. Veteran’s benefits seem to be staring up at the gibbet. Untold tens of thousands in other struggling nations have lost needed American aid they may never see again, and never adequately replace. Some are already dying here, especially in fully controlled red-governed states that are implementing Trump’s MAGA policies remorselessly. The damage expands every day. When will Americans have had enough of being told to obey by amoral greed-driven overlords getting all their vital information for unknown ends by unknown people? Taking all so many of our ancestors fought to protect when they were needed, is an attack on our shared history.
Chances are that much worse is yet to come. How much worse the still living among us then, will find out. And for all we know, or suspect we know, that the Trump dictatorship is doing, does anyone doubt secret evil acts are being planned and fashioned to ensure that the power Trump and his henchmen gained, shall never be willingly relinquished? We see the iceberg tops, the below surface Magaism mass in the dark depths is surely there too. What can we do? What will we do? Can we do nothing at all and live with that choice? For how long? Can we openly oppose the spreading darkness, and bear the consequences that opposition will most likely bring? All of these moral mortal human choices are what this searing ‘Edge of Darkness’ movie is all about. The words we write here, if we do, are a testament to our American belief in free speech. Will our Constitution stand? Our Democracy? Will we …?
My ancestors, and our American soldiers in 1944, would I am certain know what they should do when the time comes if it has not already, and set about doing that. Whatever our differences, most of us will never accept a dictator’s boot on The Constitution, or a fake king’s golden crown on an anti-American fascist dictator foreign-puppet for long. We have American examples, “giants” one of the Norwegians villagers likes to call them in their national history, that fought when enemies were advancing in our own long past. Some we learn about. Some are or were in our own families. And some are remembered crawling wet on killing field beaches doing the best they can to end evil empires led by murderers. Whatever comes, what ever we do, their moral mortal fortitude in times of darkness should help us choose our future paths lit by their determined luminosity.
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