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2024 US Election: A Superpower Commits Suicide and Fascism Triumphs

Introduction

This piece is being written on November 6th, 2024, the day after Donald Trump was once again elected US president. Every time I think “Americans can’t be that stupid, they can’t be that willing to embrace ignorance and hatred,” I’m proven desperately wrong. Apparently the people of the US are so racist and sexist, and so eager to embrace an ideology of willful denial and savage hate, that they will vote for a convicted felon, a proven rapist, an insurrectionist, and fascist. I also don’t forgive or excuse the people who voted for Trump out of a frustration with the status quo, or the people who sat on the sidelines and didn’t vote. Both of those groups had mountains of evidence telling them who Trump was, who his allies are, and what their agenda was. What functional difference is there between an ardent fascist and someone who votes for an ardent fascist? If the end result is the end of American democracy, then that’s a distinction without a difference. Now the US will have a fascist as commander and chief, with blanket immunity for everything he does provided to him by a pliant and ultra-conservative supreme court earlier in 2024. 

All the things I mentioned and a lot more besides bode extremely ill both for the United States, and the rest of the world for generations to come. I’m going to divide this piece into two sections, what I think this election will mean for the rest of the world as they’re forced to deal with the US, and what this will mean for the US internally. Normally I’d take pains to point out that I’m far from an expert in world affairs and all that, but as I’m sitting here writing this I don’t have the energy. This will be an emotional and off the cuff reaction, and it’s mostly to get my thoughts out so I don’t go insane. 

The Rest of the World

First of all, I’d like to say sorry to the rest of the world that you’re stuck with having to deal with the US. In the short term to medium term, Trump’s reelection will probably be on a scale from bad to a complete disaster for Ukraine, Palestine, NATO, possibly the UN, and any US participation in global climate initiatives. Trump spent his first term cozying up to dictators and strong men while being combative with longtime strategic allies. Trump and the entire Republican party have also decided that denying climate change and running the planet into the ground is great politics (which I suppose in America it is since it got them elected). All of this is unsettling and will make the world a much more unsafe and uncertain place to live in. 

I think Trump’s second term will also accelerate the US’ decline as a global superpower. This is likely a process that takes decades, but in a nutshell, I’m guessing a lot of countries around the world will conclude that if the US is filled with lunatics who want to be in a climate change denying, protectionist, and isolationist country why not let them. If the US continues to deny that it is just one country in a larger world, and not the whole fucking universe, then the rest of the world will probably start to move on. Financial markets, imports and exports, military collaboration, investments, and so much more will gradually shift as the US isolates itself out of great power status. 

The ironic and almost hilarious part about this trend is that the people who are absolutely obsessed with American greatness and exceptionalism are the ones who voted for Trump and will support his policies. They’re far too stupid to know anything about geopolitics or the wider global economy, so they will be unable to see how their actions helped usher in the American decline they were so desperate to avert. I said it’s almost hilarious because these people are also incapable of admitting when they were wrong or made a mistake, and they will absolutely start looking for scapegoats at home and abroad. The death throes of great powers are almost always exceptionally bloody, and a country dumb enough to elect Trump twice is certainly dumb enough to go out swinging wildly. 

America Itself

There are a lot of factors that went into Trump’s rise to power. The first is that many Americans are supremely bigoted, willfully and maliciously ignorant, and looking for someone to give them permission to be as horrible as they want. Another factor is establishment media spent a decade sane washing all the insane and corrupt things Trump said and did in their efforts to be “”””neutral.”””” Apparently these media companies were either owned by wealthy interests who steered their editorial line away from open criticism of Trump, or they were too stupid to realize that refusing to criticize fascism is an acquiescence to fascism. Yet another factor is that the US legal system was nothing but bureaucratized injustice. Trump spent his entire adult life committing crimes and never facing any consequences for them. Even when he was convicted of 34 felonies he was never sentenced to any punishment. At every turn Trump exposed the fact that any guardrails in place to protect the US governmental system were either paper thin, or based entirely on an honor system. All it took to erode them was someone shameless enough to never pay lip service to convention. 

I don’t know how bad things are going to be in the United States during and after Trump’s second term. Every branch of the government will be aligned with Trump’s agenda, and there look to be no significant obstacles stopping him from doing whatever he wants. Will he suspend the constitution and declare martial law? Will he make himself president for life and choose his successor like other authoritarian presidencies have in the past? Will massive concentration camps be built so that millions of immigrants and migrants will be forcibly deported? Will criticism of the president and the government be made illegal? Will abortion be outlawed nationwide? Will attacks on the LGTBQ community continue to escalate in their intensity and ferocity? Will opposition parties be outlawed in the United States? Will public education be gutted in the United States, or turned into an engine for promoting climate change denial and fascism? I can’t even begin to guess how bad the rest of the 2020s and beyond will be for America. I hope that I’m wrong, and that this is looked on as fantastical panicking in the future. It’s not wise to underestimate the capacity for human cruelty, though, especially when it has the backing of a powerful state. I think the future will prove that people were right to be afraid and apprehensive. 

Conclusion

In August of 2024, I reviewed and discussed a book about the Guatemalan journalist Irma Flaquer, who spent decades working in the worst years of the Guatemalan civil war. She was eventually disappeared in 1980, and her body was never recovered. After the 2024 US election I find myself thinking about Irma once again. I admired her strength and determination in the face of extreme danger, and her commitment to stay in Guatemala even when she knew her life was in serious risk. I don’t know if I possess that same courage. When I learned the results of the 2024 election, I found myself wondering whether I should just give up, and try and keep my head down while trying to ignore everything that is going on around me. On the other hand, I wondered whether I should try and leave for a different country while I still had the chance. I don’t know what direction my life will take me, but I also wanted to point out that in 2024 there were still people like Irma Flaquer. People who were afraid for the future and knew how dangerous the circumstances would be, but were determined to try and make the world a better place anyway. There were people like that in America, who felt the loss of Trump’s victory, but kept working anyway.

 I wanted to point that out for posterity. There’s something else I want to say to the future too that’s less hopeful. In the future Americans will receive a lot of scorn and derision. How could they elect someone like Trump twice, how stupid can they be? I want to say to the future that Americans deserve every bit of scorn and derision that you can dish out. We deserve it. For every person who worked for a better future, there was someone who wanted to be hateful and Trump gave them permission, there was someone was so selfish they would condemn the whole country to fascism because they thought it would lower the price of gasoline a little bit, and there was someone who was so apathetic they didn’t care what happened to the country or the rest of the world as long as nothing bad affected them directly. That’s all very damning for a society that pretended they had moral values and cared about democracy. That’s also a terrifying warning for the future as well. The 21st century learned absolutely nothing from the rise of fascism in the 20th century. The only people who did learn were the fascists who had a nice guidebook giving them tips on what buttons to push to gain followers and amass power. You’re wrong if you think the time and place you live in is safe from those same forces taking over a significant portion of the population where you live. Look around yourself and wonder who among you would embrace malignant ignorance and violence as a guiding worldview, maybe it’s someone you work with, a family member, or a neighbor. If I can provide any advice from the past it’s this: Be more vigilant and proactive than we were, and watch for the warning signs of fascism before they’re too powerful to reverse. 

PS: I know a lot of foreign powers worked to help sew and spread division within the United States to help weaken it and divide it from within. Those foreign powers did not start the fires of division, however, they merely fueled the fire that was already burning and helped make it worse. The people of the United States were perfectly capable of destroying the United States on their own thank you very much.

When I’m writing this piece in the early 21st century, humanity has become increasingly aware of the runaway damage that is being caused to the human body and the environment at large by the enormous amount of plastic that is being produced and then immediately thrown away. Story after story recounted the millions of tons of plastic being thrown away every year to subsequently pollute the environment, creating non-biodegradable waste that could be a hazard for hundreds of thousands of years. Study after study began to demonstrate that microplastics had found their way into practically every part of the human body in billions of people around the globe, the negative effects of which are still not entirely understood at the time of this writing. For all the people living through this crisis, and all the people in the future who will be forced to deal with plastic pollution, it is a justifiably concerning issue. How long will humanity be forced to pay the price for overuse of plastics in the 20th and 21st centuries? Perhaps a better question is, could this crisis have been prevented, or mitigated in some way? 

My answer to that question is no. The short answer to why is that people are really really bad at guessing the long term impacts of their decisions, or even stopping to wonder if there will be long term impacts. A template could be written for all the times a new technology, method, or material has been rapidly adopted to benefit humanity, only for humanity to realize that there is a downside. That downside might only make itself apparent years, decades or centuries later.

Here are some examples of this short term thinking that I can list off the top of my head. Using coal, natural gas, and oil as an energy source (think of the downsides in both the use and extraction of these resources). Putting lead and asbestos in a host of things. The widespread use of CFCs that burned some holes in the ozone layer of the atmosphere. The radioactive byproducts of nuclear weapon development and testing, and from fission power plants. All of these things and a lot more than I can think of all had or have these upsides and downsides. Some of the downsides can be mitigated, or weighed against the benefits if used responsibly. Talking through the ups and downs and responsible use are difficult and complicated discussions that are well worth having. How often do those discussions take place before something is widely adopted though? How many environmental impact studies were done to gauge the effects of plastics on people and the environment before we started churning out millions upon millions of tons of the stuff?

Some of these technologies or materials were developed and being used around the globe long before there was any way to study their detrimental impacts, but I don’t view that as an excuse, I see it as a warning. Humanity can kill itself faster than we can save ourselves, in fact, we are capable of killing ourselves without even realizing what we are doing. 

There’s also another angle to this issue that I haven’t talked about yet. At this point I’ve been assuming that if only people knew the negative impacts of something they wouldn’t use it, or they would be more careful and cautious about its implementation. Is that true though? What if people would profit mightily from exploiting a technology or resource? If they learned of the downsides to what they were doing, would they stop for the good of humanity and the planet? Or would they continue to exploit the resource that makes them money? Are people so selfish and shortsighted that they would help poison humanity and the planet just to make a little more money in addition to the money they already have? Yes, they are that selfish and shortsighted. There are plenty of examples of an industry learning about the downsides to what they’re doing long before it becomes a subject of public discussion, and the industry works mightily to bribe lawmakers and to change or confuse the narrative so they can keep hurting people and the planet for as long as they can get away with it. It would be bad enough if people were simply stupid or ignorant and only had to be educated into changing their ways. So much harm has been done by people who were perfectly aware of what they were doing and did it anyway, because as long as it doesn’t affect them personally it doesn’t matter.

This observation leads me to ending this piece sounding like a broken record, because I don’t think there’s anything for us to do about this problem. I could say that humanity needs to be less selfish and greedy and that we need to develop better foresight to better gauge the long term impacts of our actions. That way we might be able to slowly roll out a new technology or material to see what environmental impacts it might have before it’s used on a global scale and we realize it’s been poisoning us the entire time. But how likely is that? Can humanity really overcome the allure of new wealth to be gained from a new convenience? Will humanity need to deploy some artificial intelligence to think through all the potential consequences of our actions for us? Could that be the only way we avoid the same pitfalls that we seem to find? 

About the only thing I see to do right now that might provide any catharsis at all is for the present to damn the past for how it’s poisoned the present. In the meantime the future can damn the present for how it’s poisoning the future. Finally, the past can laugh at the present and the future because they haven’t learned a damn thing.

For this piece I wanted to share with the readers a sort of maxim that I try to live by, in the hopes that readers might find it useful in their own lives. Before I do that, however, I wanted to make clear that I’m not trying to branch out into becoming some sort of life advice or personal help guru. Most people who claim to be such a thing in my corner of time and space are insufferable, arrogant, and are far less worldly than their persona would imply. Taking oneself too seriously while dispensing advice is a path that can easily lead to becoming a cult leader. This might sound hypocritical if readers look back on some of my previous writing to discover that I often give advice on how people should behave and think. Me being a hypocrite is not an impossible suggestion, but I hope that I remain curious enough to learn, and humble enough to admit my shortcomings so that I will avoid classic cultish pitfalls. 

With those disclaimers out of the way, what is the personal maxim that I try to live by? It’s probably not that inventive, other people have and probably will think of something similar. It can be boiled down to two words, simple, and hopefully honest, bitter resolve. Determination or perseverance are close to synonyms but they don’t quite capture what I mean. “Steely resolve” might be a less negative way to describe the idea. Either way, it speaks to a way of looking at the world that is neither blindly hopeful, nor despondent. What might this attitude of bitter or steely resolve look like in practice? I think climate change is the perfect example. 

This piece is being written at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. As I’m writing this the effects of human-enabled climate change are growing in number and severity. Wildfires, floods, hurricanes, drought, record breaking temperatures, and more are all on the rise, and all signs indicate they will only grow worse as the 21st wears on. While there remains a vocal minority who vociferously deny that climate change is happening, anyone who isn’t an idiot could justifiably wonder if climate change might be an existential threat to humanity, and a lot of other life on the planet. I’m not discounting that fear, there are times when a certain amount of fear is the rational response to a situation. On the other hand, fear and a mixture of other emotions can lead people to two extreme and unhelpful conclusions. 

The first is that people give up. They feel like there is nothing that can be done to solve or mitigate the effects of climate change, so they don’t try. I can understand this mindset. As a person who has struggled with depression since puberty I have felt like life is hopeless and pointless more times than I can remember. However, I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to point out that a lot of people are selfish and lazy. Giving up and wailing that everything is hopeless is a convenient excuse, it means you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to advocate for change in local and global climate policies, and you don’t have to make any changes in your lifestyle that might be able to help the environment. There are people who feel genuinely hopeless about humanity’s chances to adapt to climate change, but I suspect there are others who give up so they don’t have to admit that they don’t care. 

The second extreme is unfettered optimism. An attitude of cheerful denial is also an excuse to do nothing. If you convince yourself that everything will work out in the end, then nothing is required of you either.

Avoiding fear or giving in to fear of the effects of climate change both have their appeals, but both are unproductive. What is productive is the rational analysis that the 21st century will be remembered as a trying time for humanity. Not only will humanity deal with the same issues it always has, war, genocide, inequality, political turmoil, but we must also come to terms with climate change largely of our own making. Will we be able to adapt to the changes we’ve made to the environment while adjusting our societies to make those changes less extreme? Time will tell. Personally I think our chances are a lot better if we avoid both dejected dread and empty hope, and instead proceed knowing the difficulties ahead with a clear sense of resolve.

Book Discussion: The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and Lies America Tells, by Sarah Churchwell

Introduction

“American fascism has always been broadly coterminous with fascism, but American exceptionalism continues to keep us from seeing it.”

The Wrath to Come is a rare type of book. I was furious reading it most of the time, and yet I cannot recommend it highly enough. The Wrath to Come is an exceptionally well researched, and extremely captivating and engaging book. What makes this book infuriating is not the quality of the writing, but the subject matter. 

The book begins by discussing the insurrection on January 6th, 2021 in Washington DC. Many Americans were shocked and found the idea of an authoritarian coup attempt, and images of people carrying Confederate battle flags in the seat of US legislative power to be completely inexplicable. The guiding thesis of The Wrath to Come is to highlight the fact that January 6th is not only explicable, it’s almost inevitable.

If I had to explain American society as succinctly as possible, I would say that America is hypocritical to its core, but it denies its hypocrisy so strongly that it transforms its own past and present into fantasy. National myth-making isn’t unique to America, but American myth-making certainly has its particular idiosyncrasies. There are a lot of aspects of the American character that white Americans are especially quick to deny to soothe their consciences, the two that The Wrath to Come focuses on are white supremacism, and American fascism. Churchwell uses Gone with the Wind, one of the most popular books in American history, as a vehicle to explore these uncomfortable, and often infuriating parts of the American past.

Gone with the Wind, or as I like to Call it: America the Book

I have never read Gone with the Wind or watched the film, but it remained popular enough even into my early life to always be a part of the cultural background noise. I didn’t realize until reading The Wrath to Come how perfectly it encapsulates so many of the worst characteristics of American society. After reading Churchwell’s analysis of Gone with the Wind and reading passages quoted from the book it’s actually stunning just how perfect an avatar Gone with the Wind is of American so-called “exceptionalism.” 

Gone with the Wind is a shockingly racist book filled to the gills with racist characters, while at the same time the author and the characters themselves repeatedly and vehemently deny that they are racist. The book is little more than apologist propaganda for plantation owning white southerners that the entire country embraced for decades. The book that was a cultural icon well into the 21st century contains a torrential downpour of white victim-hood. Criminals endlessly projecting their crimes onto the people they victimized in a fantasy so deranged it can only be sustained with extreme violence. That violence has been ongoing for centuries, and continues right up to the moment I am writing this sentence, and will likely continue for long after, so long the US continues to sustain the fantasy. 

“Guilt is the great leveller in American life – violence justified by dint of its sheer ordinariness. If everyone is guilty, then guilt ceases to matter; it shifts the burden of guilt onto the victim, or disperses it into the social ether, where it can euthanize the nation’s conscience.”

Along with the constant racism, and the constant denial of that constant racism, America has also constantly denied our homegrown authoritarianism and fascism. People who want to see January 6th 2021 as an aberration are missing three crucial points. The first is that democracies are always under threat, they are never safe from authoritarians of some variety wanting to destroy or co-opt them. The second is that America has never been that democratic. This was a country founded by land-owning white men (many of them enslavers), deciding that they were the only ones who could vote. With every expansion of the franchise there have always been people who not only opposed the increased number of voters, they often spent their adult lives trying to roll back that progress, often with great success. The third point is that authoritarians have always existed in the United States, all the propaganda and national myth making about freedom and liberty have done little to curb that fact. Americans of the early 21st century especially underestimated how popular and widespread fascism was in the 1930s before the start of the second world war. When this was being written in the early 2020s there was also a rise once again of global fascism. People in the United States thought fascism rising in America was anathema to American values, but that idea in itself is another symptom of denial and myth-making. 

“American fascism was never exorcised, but merely obscured beneath romantic myth-making that displaced a reckoning with various aspects of the nation’s past. To conclude that American interwar fascist groups were always on the ‘lunatic fringe,’ and could never have consolidated power, is to decide that what did not happen could not happen, replacing the contingency of history with the certainty of retrospection. It is to deny the possibility that they were just biding their time.”

“Insisting that European fascism was categorically distinct from American white supremacism turned American racism into another exception that has exempted America from the same historical reckonings as other countries and helped white supremacism flourish even as fascism was discredited domestically after the war: because American white supremacism was just good old-fashioned thick-headed American prejudice.”

While the United States seems pathologically committed to ignoring its history of racism and fascism, there have also always been people who saw the threat these views posed and tried to warn people. That could be a reason to hope, or a reason for further despair depending on how you look at it. It’s good that there are always insightful societal doctors, who can accurately diagnose symptoms and causes and recommend treatment. It’s also depressing that no one ever seems to listen to these societal doctors, because the same causes with the same symptoms continually reappear. I’m going to quote a passage from The Wrath to Come, which itself quotes a 19th century publication. The quoted publication is from the late 19th century, after the US civil war, and it is criticizing a particular political strategy, and I encourage the reader to think about politics in their own lifetime to see if it sounds familiar to them. 

“Reconstruction did not fail so much as it was overthrown. The Republic concluded that the problem was with a politics that had no strategy except to ‘arouse race-hatred and fan into renewed flames the fires of sectional strife…It knows nothing but the dead past. It can only hinder, and then cry aloud in scorn at the troubles which itself has largely fomented. Its chief strategy is to raise false issues… “They raise the whirlwind” and reap, but cannot control, the storm.’” 

Scarlet O’Hara: America the Character

Before talking about the main character of Gone with the Wind I’ll give a bite sized overview of the book and plot for those who are fortunate enough to have avoided learning any details about the book or film to this point. The book is a work of historical fiction that begins just before the US civil war and ends right around the end of the reconstruction period after the civil war in the last quarter of the 19th century. The main character is Scarlet O’Hara, a young white woman born into the wealthy Georgia slavocracy. Gone with the Wind follows Scarlet as she tries to maintain both her position in the elite of white Georgia society, and her mistakes and misadventures to find love. As long-time readers might guess, I’m not even remotely interested in Scarlet’s love life in Gone with the Wind, and as Churchwell continually points out in The Wrath to Come, Scarlet’s true love isn’t for a person anyway, it’s for wealth and land. Scarlet is beyond obsessed with keeping both her family plantation, and maintaining her social stature in her society. That obsession with land and status absolutely includes forcing Black Americans to labor on Scarlet’s behalf, even after the end of the Civil War.  

With that bit of background laid out, let’s take a look at Scarlet O’Hara. I feel like this should be obvious, but Scarlet is supremely racist. She’s also greedy, superficial, stubborn to a fault, and not that intelligent. “Selfish” isn’t nearly descriptive or powerful enough to describe Scarlet’s single minded self interest. In the book she appears almost incapable of recognizing or empathizing with other people’s suffering, especially of the people she enslaves. 

There is another important part of Scarlet’s character that’s admirable to a point, but exists to such a degree in Scarlet that it becomes foolhardy. Scarlet refuses to give up or admit defeat. Which, as I said, could be admirable. However, this is also paired with Scarlet’s constant refrain that she’ll think about or deal with this or that problem tomorrow. 

Just to be clear, I’m not trying to imply that characters in fiction can’t or shouldn’t be flawed. Imperfect characters make them more relatable and more human. What I do want to point out is that for decades white readers of Gone with the Wind either didn’t recognize or refused to grapple with Scarlet’s racism. In addition, her stubbornness and refusal to accept reality, and instead attempting to force reality to match her wishes and desires is a flaw, but it wasn’t seen that way by many readers. 

That attitude of “I refuse to accept reality and I’ll deal with all my problems tomorrow,” is about the most American thing I’ve ever heard. The United States is a country of delay, deny, obfuscate, deny some more, until a problem blows up in our faces in the most avoidable way possible. If Gone with the Wind was written as self aware satire, with the goal of ridiculing and highlighting all the flaws and hypocrisies of American culture, then I would be hailing it as one of the greatest and most insightful books ever written. The fact that the book was written without a hint of self-awareness makes it even more authentically American, yet another example of the glaringly obvious truths that America labors to ignore. 

This is getting off the topic of The Wrath to Come, but Scarlet’s attitude of trying to get the universe to conform to her fantasies combined with her procrastination remind me the most of the United States’ response to climate change in the early 21st century. I’m simplifying here, because obviously there were millions of people who recognized and worked to mitigate the effects of climate change, and bring about real societal transformation that would see the United States become more sustainable. If, however, I had to describe the US as an individual, I would describe it as a person refusing to truly change their destructive behaviors, and instead plunge headlong into destruction while it dragged the rest of the planet along with them. 

One final point before concluding. When I titled the sections of this piece, “America the Book, and America the Character,” that was not a compliment. Those were in fact damning condemnations. The reader might be saying to themselves, “Well duh, at what point would anyone construe everything you just wrote as complimentary, was it even necessary to write that? Who could miss what is so readily apparent?” Who indeed.

Conclusion

The subject matter of The Wrath to Come is as infuriating as it is depressing. A history of violence, impunity, and injustice all in service to a notion of racial superiority so hollow it collapses under the weight of the lightest scrutiny. While the material of the book is disturbing, the quality and consistency of the writing is something I aspire to as an author. I included several quotes in the book that corresponded to the topics I wanted to highlight in this piece, but if I wanted to quote every passage of the book I liked I would simply copy and paste the entire book. I strongly suggest the reader pick up a copy of The Wrath to Come for themselves. Not only will they enjoy the quality of the writing, but the history the book elucidates needs to be understood, no matter how uncomfortable it may become. 

Just as important as understanding this uncomfortable history is what to do about it. This process of denial and myth-making can’t be undone by voting for a few different elected officials, that isn’t nearly enough. The only way this changes is that we once and for all confront the real history of this country, our denial and our fantasies. The longer we delay, the longer we refuse to deal with this issue, the more difficult it will be to fix, and the more damage it will do.

Link For The Wrath to Come: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-wrath-to-come-sarah-churchwell/1141267113?ean=9781789542998

Book Discussion: Disappeared, A Journalist Silenced: The Irma Flaquer Story by June Carolyn Erlick

Irma Flaquer was a Guatemalan journalist born in 1938 who was forcibly disappeared in 1980. As of this writing her body has still never been discovered, she shares that fate along with thousands of other Guatemalans who were disappeared (I’m consciously using disappeared as a verb) during the decades long civil war in Guatemala. Reading Erlick’s book, learning about Irma’s life and story, and reading a lot of Irma’s writing is a depressing but necessary task. 

On one hand, I deeply admire Irma’s tenacity, bravery, and principles. Before she was kidnapped, she survived a car bombing in 1969 for her work. That attempt on her life put a stop to her career in political journalism only briefly, before she felt compelled to return to the fray. When she returned to journalism she faced constant threats to her life, heavy and repressive censorship, and often stretched finances trying to keep her publications solvent. Throughout all these difficulties she appears to never have accepted bribes or favors from people trying to influence her work, and she eventually disavowed any entanglements with political parties that might compromise her ability to speak with her own voice. As she herself said in these two quotes: “I believe my obligation is to tell the truth, no matter whom it hurts.” “In our long lives as journalists, we’ve learned never to make unconditional allegiance.”

From this perspective, Irma is someone to be applauded and admired. A rare person of bravery and conviction in an environment that punished both of those qualities. To be clear, I do admire Irma. When I heard of her and Erlick’s biography about Irma I knew I had to read it. A person pitted against such overwhelmingly powerful and violent opponents, with her only weapons being her typewriter and her mind is a person of remarkable strength. 

On the other hand, Irma’s story painfully demonstrates how injustice and impunity are the undisputed victors of political struggle in human affairs. As of this writing of Disappeared, who exactly kidnapped Irma remained a mystery, because even mentioning that she had disappeared remained a dangerous prospect until the peace process ending the civil war was finalized in the late 1990s. There were two separate truth commissions that collected data and thousands of accounts from victims in the civil war in the 1990s as well. To my knowledge, however, almost no one was actually punished for their role in the civil war or the atrocities committed during it. In my opinion in Irma’s case and in general, victories for justice and truth are too often symbolic, always gesturing towards but never arriving at real meaningful change. Impunity, even if wounded, is never vanquished. People in Guatemala during the civil war, and all over the world throughout time have been forced to experience two traumas. One is the trauma of whatever injustice was inflicted upon them. The second is being forced to watch as nothing is done to investigate or punish those responsible. 

From this perspective, one might wonder if the best course of action is to not be like Irma. A journalist in Irma’s position could have prioritized their own safety and not stuck their neck out. Maybe they could’ve been bribed or cajoled into printing lies. Perhaps they simply could’ve ignored the violence of the civil war and willfully blinded themselves to its victims. Laziness, corruption, selfishness, all of these are easier than being dedicated, principled, and selfless. Besides what did all the journalists, union leaders, activists, and revolutionaries who were murdered or disappeared ultimately accomplish in Guatemala anyway? Did they help inaugurate a new era of peace and justice in Guatemala? Or does Guatemala remain a starkly unequal country still afraid to confront the violence of its past and its present?

I don’t agree with that interpretation, not because I’m an optimist that believes in the ultimate triumph of justice, but because even if we all fail, the attempt to try and build a better world is worth the effort.

Ultimately, my feeling towards Irma is a respect for her bravery and the intellectual and spiritual journey her life was taking, that was tragically and unforgivably cut short by assailants who got away with her murder (and the murder of one of Irma’s sons who was shot during Irma’s kidnapping). While Irma’s work in Guatemala, and the work of everyone else murdered during the civil war remains unfinished, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be grateful for their attempts to try. Reflecting on a personal level I don’t know if I possess the selflessness and the determination that kept Irma in Guatemala until her disappearance (although this is being written in the middle of 2024 in the US, and if democracy does eventually fall to fascism maybe I’ll get the chance to find out).

If you’re interested in a more complete picture of Irma’s personality, beliefs, life, and writing then I absolutely recommend reading Disappeared. Erlick takes the reader through Irma’s tragically short life and the world of Guatemala and Central America in the middle of the 20th century. Reading Disappeared is emotionally challenging, but being challenged is often the best way for us to grow and become wiser. I’d like to close out this piece with a selection of some of Irma’s writing that Erlick translated into English.

Selection of Quotes:

-This first quote is excerpted in the book, and each paragraph shifts focus to a different topic. From these shifts in topic, the reader learns a lot of Irma’s beliefs. This passage hasn’t lost any of its relevance either, even if the reference to the Vietnam War is dated (the reader could probably substitute whatever war or wars are currently happening when they are reading this). 

“There are always those chieftains who stir up war, invoking God, Liberty, and Happiness. And they blithely kill anyone who gets in the way—-including civilians, children, women, old people, like in Vietnam—–and then they say they are Christians…”

“But nothing happens. People keep dying of hunger, people keep on without jobs or earning a pittance, people keep on without the opportunity to provide health care to their children, let alone an opportunity for a career. Peace is not on the horizon for the hungry and poor…”

“Each politician wants to be the only one, the savior, the Messiah, and nothing is going to happen. The problems that affect all Guatemalans can only be resolved by all of us Guatemalans.” 

-The next three paragraphs are all from different columns Irma wrote that are quoted in different sections of Disappeared. Two of them speak on wider themes of justice, but all of them were referencing a case of two murdered brothers that Irma followed closely for years. Irma herself eventually became a victim of the violence and impunity that she so eruditely criticized.

“The greatest source of violence in our country or in any part of the world is the lack of confidence in the administration of justice, in the police and in the courts. If the law doesn’t act in an equitable fashion, then we have first-class citizens and second-class citizens, and citizens will take the law into their own hands. The final result will be the breakdown of the institutions, and that will be bad for the republic, bad for us all.”

“The rich and influential have gone free for their crimes, while the poor are fatally destined to rot for stealing a piece of bread for their children. The belief that there is no justice is the true mother of all violence.” 

“…It’s like the case of the Paiz Maselli brothers. They were killed and then the court declared that no one killed them. The assassin’s bullets were fired by somebody called nobody. Such an absurd thing can only happen in Guatemala.”

-This next quote was excerpted in the book also, and for the sake of brevity I’m cutting it down as well. This might tell the reader more about me than it does about Irma, but it was my favorite quote in the book. Irma’s faith I would describe as an eclectic but enthusiastic spirituality, rather than a dogmatic religiosity. Irma had a syncretic belief system, incorporating and fusing ideas and practices from many faiths, that built upon a strong Catholic foundation. This quote is discussing her evolving view of Saint Francis of Assisi, and how there may be limits to the value of turning the other cheek in a world of violent injustice. If the reader does get a copy of Disappeared the rest of this quote is in the chapter “Decisions.”

“I’ve always been inspired by Saint Francis of Assisi; he has made me feel more love, greater nobility of purpose in my heart: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hate, I will always have love; where there is hurt, pardon; where there is doubt, faith.”

“Today, Saint Francis seems completely naive to me. “Don’t tell me those tales already. Come here, and I want to see how you manage to spread love, compassion, light in Guatemala. Let’s see if you can…” 

“…Among humans, here in Guatemala, you couldn’t do anything; you’d be taken as a crazy man, a Communist, an unwitting tool, and as such, you would be murdered by who knows what group…” 

Good-reads Link for Disappeared: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/323701.Disappeared?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=KwBTToXMkk&rank=1