Is that the sound of History rhyming?

(As published in the Toronto Star on Aug. 28. 2024)

Greetings, Canadians of 2024.

I write from Paris, France, in September of 1942. We have been living under Nazi occupation for two years and let me tell you, we are not enjoying it. Last July, the Nazi authorities ordered the mass arrest of Jewish families as part of a plan to eradicate undesirable elements from the French populace.
In the so-called Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup, gendarmes arrested 13,152 Jews — among them 4,115 children — and crowded them into an indoor sports arena, the Velodrome d’Hiver, without food, water, or sanitary facilities. They then moved them to internment camps before deporting them in cattle cars to death camps, mainly Auschwitz.
I write to you because, as Mark Twain once warned, “History never repeats itself, but often it rhymes.” And because Donald J. Trump, running against Kamala Harris to become president of your next-door neighbor, recently ratcheted up his rhetoric regarding targeted minorities he deems undesirable — in his case, immigrants. Under a policy he calls “remigration,” Trump promises not only to “suspend refugee resettlement” but to round up and “return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries.”
As Canadians, why should this concern you? Well, the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup did not happen in Germany but in France — the occupied next-door neighbor from which I write. I hasten to add that I do not caution you against a Nazi-style invasion. Before that happens, and as many American historians and political journalists have warned, the U.S. will probably descend into civil war.
But listen for the rhymes. In 1930s Germany, a charismatic demagogue — a convicted criminal who had led a failed insurrection — contrived to unify right-wing extremists bent on seizing control of the state. Adolf Hitler did not start his political career as a genocidal Nazi but as a garden-variety fascist promising a return to a mythical paradise peopled by a superior race.
He manipulated the system, installed allies in key positions, and began knocking down the guardrails of a functioning democracy. That the world avoided a Nazi victory in the Second World War was thanks largely to what happened in Britain.
Late in September 1938, prime minister Neville Chamberlain arrived home from a Munich meeting with Hitler proclaiming that he had achieved “peace in our time.” One year later, when Hitler invaded Poland, Chamberlain lost all credibility as a leader — and, under pressure, resigned in favor of Winston Churchill. If Chamberlain’s just-in-time resignation puts you in mind of Joe Biden, yes, you hear history rhyming.
Churchill had declared Chamberlain’s ballyhooed Munich Agreement “a total and unmitigated defeat” and prophesied that worse would follow unless people mustered the courage to speak out. Late in May 1940, with more than 300,000 British and Allied troops trapped in France on the beaches of Dunkirk, he led Britain in working a miracle evacuation. He fought on until the war was won. Churchill was the right man in the right place at the right time — a man of destiny.
Not long ago, in a front-page article, the New York Times proclaimed Donald Trump “a man of chaos and destiny” because he had dodged a bullet. In truth, Kamala Harris is today’s person of destiny — an individual who has emerged just in time to prevent an epic debacle.
Two decades younger than Trump, smart and fearless, Harris knows how to deal with felons. While serving in California as a prosecutor and attorney general, she took on all kinds of perpetrators: “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
From Occupied France, I hear her loud and clear.
My 21st-century amanuensis ended his latest book, ”Shadows of Tyranny,” with an epilogue entitled “Where Is Our Churchill?” He wanted to know who would lead the resistance? He grew increasingly desperate when, during the first presidential debate, Trump knocked an old man to the ground and kicked him repeatedly.
But wait! Joe Biden arose and, like Neville Chamberlain before him, resigned in favour of a warrior-successor. Was History repeating itself? Not exactly. But if Biden is Chamberlain and History is rhyming, who is playing Churchill? Kamala Harris, of course. Woman of destiny.

(As published in the Toronto Star.)