Another in the series of pieces I venture in my effort to find the most constructive ways to engage and challenge the conservative audience for my radio shows in Virginia.

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<em>Another in the series of pieces I venture in my effort to find the most constructive ways to engage and challenge the conservative audience for my radio shows in Virginia.</em>

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It’s said that trauma reverberates through the generations, that people are affected by the impact on their ancestors of the disasters and nightmares they lived through. That can be true of the private traumas of families terrible deaths, ruinous disasters or of the collective traumas of whole peoples.

For example, it appears to be the case that the traumatic “Burning” that the Shenandoah Valley suffered in the last years of the Civil War leaves an imprint on the culture here that’s detectable still.

Traumas can disable people, or they can sensitize people. I’m the heir of an ancestral trauma that, I believe, has made me more able than most to recognize the toxic smell of hatred as it seeps into a land, more aware of the ugly and destructive possibilities the spirit of hatred can portend.

 I grew up in the Midwest, an American boy who spent his hours trying to hone his skills in football, basketball and baseball; watching John Wayne movies and singing “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” Proud to be part of the country that had just rescued the world from fascism, of the country where, at the entrance to the harbor of the nation’s pre-eminent city there stands a Statue of Liberty in whose base are inscribed the famous words inviting to come the world’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

In my case, it’s only two generations back that my ancestors all four of my grandparents were among those coming to America with that yearning to breathe free. It’s only two generations back, little more than a century ago, that my mother’s mother and her family experienced the trauma that drove them here to escape the terror of a land in which the spirit of hatred had been let loose by the use of hateful lies.

It’s a story I heard, many times, in my childhood. It was my mother who told me, just as it had been her own mother the one who’d actually experienced it who’d told her. That’s one way that traumatic experience can be transmitted, though I understand that the imprint of such nightmares can be passed along even if not a word about it is spoken.

My grandmother was a little girl, five or six years old, hiding with her family and several other families in the attic of the main building of their little village in Czarist Russia. Their village was under attack, and they all had to be perfectly silent so no one would know they were there. When the dawn came, my grandmother looked down through a knothole in the floorboards and was startled to see an open eye staring up at her. And then she saw: it was the eye of a corpse, a dead man, lying on top of a stack of bodies their murderers had placed there during the night.

That’s the story, short and simple. But the meaning of it opens up a bigger picture. In Czarist Russia, the ruling powers felt threatened by the discontent of the population they’d oppressed and exploited for generations. To safeguard their power, a century or so ago, these powers worked to redirect the people’s fear and rage: "It’s not we, your oppressors, who are your enemy," was the essence of the message of these ruling forces, "it’s these other people who are different from you."

It’s an ancient trick, used by evil rulers from time imemmorial: divide people, and channel the angry and fearful energies of your followers against some “other,” something not like “Us.”

In Czarist Russia, this ugly ploy resulted in a wave of pogroms against the Jews violent attacks like the one my grandmother lived through. And at the heart of the strategy --by which these peasants were led to hate the scapegoat and ally themselves with their oppressors-- was the use of the hateful lie.

In the Russia of the Czars, for example, the peasants' minds were poisoned with lies about the Jews’ murdering Christian children and using their blood in ritual. Absolutely nothing to it. But people who believe such lies can themselves do unspeakable things.

In that same Russia of a century ago there was first circulated also the most famous perhaps of all lies, a complete forgery called THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION, a fabrication to make people fear the supposed power of a defenseless people.

Such hateful lies produced the atrocities that traumatized my grandmother and, incidentally, affronted the entire civilized world of the early twentieth century.

It also led to a huge exodus of people from Russia two million people including my four grandparents.

And thanks to their reaching these shores, I have been privileged to grow up playing sandlot ball and being one of the guys in this great melting pot of American society.

But my ancestral experience has sensitized me to the stench given off by the hateful spirit.  And I’m alarmed these days at how this stench is rising in our country.

The news has been full of hateful lies of this kind.

** Obama is a Muslim, the word went out last fall, trying to exploit the way our recent national experience has associated “Muslim” with “threat.”A lie to help stoke people’s fears, knowing that fear is the best way to divide people, and dividing is the best way to conquer.

**Obama’s going to take away our guns a story, with no evidence to support it, to scare people about something is central for many people to their feelings of security. Fear this man, the subtext goes: he’s not your president, he’s a threat.

** Obama wasn’t born in America, he’s an alien, and he can’t be our president. So claims against all evidence the “birther movement,” sowing fear and resentment as if this man who looks different from previous presidents is a usurper, not legitimately deserving of the office he won.These forces will SAY ANYTHING, encourage any falsehood, however absurd, to prevent the bridge-builder who beat them at the polls from bringing different groups of Americans together.

** Obama’s health care plan contains provisions to kill off our elderly again, a complete fabrication, with no basis whatsoever in reality sowing fear that behind his agenda lies murderous intent.

Another lie, and again, the lie is to foment fear.  It's all about making people afraid so that they will oppose even changes that would make their own lives more secure by ending the fleecing of Americans by the present system.

Never in my lifetime have I seen such utter dishonesty operating so pervasively at the center of our political life. So many lies, and all of them it seems are fashioned to foster fear and hatred.It alarms me.

Never in my lifetime have I seen lies capturing the minds of such a substantial part of our populace. The lies about the guns led to a four- or five-fold increase in the sales of guns and ammunition. And less than half of all Republicans, nationwide, tell pollsters that they believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States.  Among the whites in the South, the percentage who doubt that Obama was born in the U.S., and therefore can legally serve as president, is more than 70 percent.

Where will the sowing of such fears and suspicions take this country?

No, I don’t imagine we have pogroms in our future.  For one thing, the present crop of lies is aimed not at defenseless minorities but at someone, who's from a previously oppressed group, who now holds power.

But one never knows just how the spirit of hateful lies will leave its imprint as history unfolds. (That Russian forgery, THE PROTOCOLS, I mentioned above did some damage back in the time of the pogroms. But who could have imagined how much those lies would later be a powerful tool for the Nazis in their campaign, nearly forty years later, to exterminate millions.)

Whatever its target today, the pattern of hatred --of Us vs. Them thinking-- and the pattern of lies and manipulation can only be dangerous for us as a society to give a home to.  The pattern of lying about the Other, and trying to destroy the Other, persists even as the targets may change.

Human history should teach us this: the spirit of hateful lies is our enemy, a curse for ALL of us, not just for their immediate targets. And we should fight against that spirit always, whenever we see it at work.

Look for the tell-tale signs. Does it foster fear and hate? Does it divide people? Does it speak to people’s worst sides? Does it require that people have to stay away from objective, responsible sources of information for them to believe it?

Don’t spread hateful lies. Don’t believe them. Don’t put your trust in the people who are willing to use them to advance their power.

This is not what we as a nation want to be.

Authors Bio:
Andy Schmookler, an award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher, was the Democratic nominee for Congress from Virginia's 6th District. His new book -- written to have an impact on the central political battle of our time -- is WHAT WE'RE UP AGAINST. His previous books include The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, for which he was awarded the Erik H. Erikson prize by the International Society for Political Psychology.