We’re having a Niemoeller Moment.

The author is a retired United States Postal Service electronics technician who now does consulting work for USPS Engineering. He’s also my brother George. You may see a family resemblance.

Can You Imagine?

Have you noticed that some of the lower court victories over the Trump administration’s arbitrary dismissals of federal workers came from lawsuits brought by their unions? This is what unions do; they actually fight for their members while the pretend friends of workers just pose for pictures.

In saner times, unions work on legislation to help their members. In the twilight of the Biden administration, the Social Security Fairness Act (H.R. 82) was signed into law. It was a longtime goal of public service unions to end the reduction in Social Security benefits of employees who have public pensions. The so-called “windfall elimination” resulted in very meager monthly payments, especially for widows and survivor annuitants.

A 2025 legislative goal, The Federal Retirement Fairness Act, if signed into law, would provide career employees the opportunity to make up contributions to their retirement benefits for the time they worked as temporary postal employees. Postal workers who begin their postal careers as temporary employees (non-career employees such as postal support employees (PSEs), transitional employees, and casuals) are not allowed to make contributions to their retirement benefits until they become career employees. The goal of this bill is to allow employees to retire on time, with their full, hard-earned retirement benefits.

Of course, that depends on whether USPS survives, which brings me to another story about unions. It’s hidden in the famous poem by Martin Niemoeller about the consequences of failing to stand up for each other when tyrants come calling. It starts, “First, they came for...” and proceeds to list victims of Nazi persecution.

In his post-World War II lectures, Niemoeller didn’t name the same set of victims every time, but it always ended in the Holocaust. When I did some reading about Niemoeller years ago, it struck me that trade unionists often made the list. Why?

So, I went back to William Shirer’s book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Trade unions in Europe were able to call general strikes and were thus an obstacle to unrestrained corporate and regime policies. They even had their own political party. So, they became targets, with the willing support of industrialists, after smaller and less popular political parties were first eliminated.

To anyone who has been paying attention for the last 40 years, organized labor in America has been fighting for its life since the Reagan administration. Tremendous amounts of money and propaganda have gone into decimating the once strong American labor movement.

Are there parallels in history? Shirer said it this way:

“... the conservative classes thought they had found a man who, while remaining their prisoner, would help them attain their goals. The destruction of the Republic was only the first step. What they then wanted was an authoritarian Germany which at home would put an end to democratic ‘nonsense’ and the power of the trade unions...”

Remember Inauguration Day 2025, with the super-rich on full display? They think they have bought themselves an oligarchy. How did that work out the last time, once Hitler was no longer their “prisoner?”

Shirer again:

“Buried under mountains of red tape, directed by the State as to what they could produce, how much and at what price, burdened by increasing taxation, and milked by steep and never-ending “special contributions” to the Party, the businessmen who had welcomed Hitler’s regime so enthusiastically because they expected it to destroy organized labor and allow an entrepreneur to practice untrammeled free enterprise, became greatly disillusioned.”

When you see, again and again, things you have never seen before in your life, isn’t it time to ask whether there is a pattern to it?

Is it just a coincidence that USAID was chosen to be the first agency on the chopping block? Or, as Neimoeller might have said, was it seen as an easy target to start with?

And what explains the total capitulation of the Republican Party to Donald Trump? Sure, some of them may fear losing their seats, but does that explain all?

A quote from Shirer brings some focus:

“... the fateful decisions secretly made, the intrigues, the treacheries, the motives and the aberrations which led up to them, the parts played by the principal actors behind the scenes, the extent of the terror they exercised and their technique of organizing it – all this and much more remained largely hidden from us...”

What is their secret fear, or the secret bargain the Republicans have made?

The Trump presidency was supposed to be about popular economics. Since there is apparently no short-term plan to lower prices, is the long-term plan to put people out of work and thereby reduce demand by making them subservient?

Listen carefully to talk about “adjustments.” It’s economic Darwinism, although that is not actually a thing. I leave it to you as a homework assignment to read what life was like for working people in the Third Reich.

Another future is possible. Robotics, AI, and new sources of energy could mean that people are freed from having to spend most of their lives working and commuting just to have a decent standard of living.

Imagine that we could take some people away from industry and put them to work doing the things humans are uniquely capable of: caring for each other, continuing education, responding to climate change, maintaining our parks, repairing environmental damage, and developing humane and sustainable methods of farming, fishing, and animal husbandry.

For the first time in history, these are do-able things, but not if tied to someone getting obscenely wealthy in the process.

When you hear about demonstrations and days of action in the weeks ahead, remember that push-back sometimes works but not pushing back never works. Don’t be afraid to imagine both bad outcomes and good ones. This is when we find out what we are willing to stand up for.

General quarters, brothers and sisters, this is not a drill.