Trust

and Its Destruction

Not quite three weeks ago, I turned my draft of Now You Know, America: Conversations with Erwin Rommel in to my editor for line-editing.

The way fiction publishing works nowadays is, you write your novel, then at your own expense, you hire an editor. Then you write your synopsis, your chapter outline, and your query, find an agent, then a publisher. God knows, the internet has given every jackalope who’s ever written a short story or poem a bullhorn or at least a kazoo. So we live inside a cacophony of too many people talking too much, saying too little, and badly, not to mention the filth that inundates us.

Thus the need for gate-keeping, chiefly of the sanity of agents, editors, and even some publishers—from the rabid, the insane, the vicious, the incoherent, and the resolutely delusional. But gate-keeping also filters out the impecunious, inherently limiting many of the stories and storytellers, not by interest in and quality of their work, but by socio-economic status, which is a good proxy for sex and race.

I began writing Now You Know in January 2022 after a conversation with Margaret Atwood broke a mental logjam, struggle with it though I did in the last months of the Tyrant’s first term and the horror of Covid that cost us more than one million excess dead. That number of the dead—one million before their time—their lost lives—the love was lost along with them—the grief of their hard and needless deaths—still takes my breath away.

I completed that draft in January 2023, and then it took me 3 and 1/4 more years to find a way to write about what we are enduring while we are enduring it. So. The history was the “easy” part, but I suspect it will be sending shoots up into the rest of my writing life.

Extraordinarily relevant today, given the surveillance state increasingly emmeshing us, was witnessing the destruction of German trust. I’ve been to two concentration camps, Mauthausen and Dachau. Mauthausen, in cold, damp, relatively remote upper Austria, frankly scared the hell out of me: after that, Dachau, outside of Munich, seemed like it had been developed as a tourist attraction. It hasn’t, of course. It just seems that way, in comparison, but then during the Reich, Mauthausen had an especially terrifying reputation. And you never knew who was going to denounce you to the Gestapo.

One of the things that hit very hard as I was working through the first draft was understanding how the Night of the Long Knives broke the German Army, the single institution with both the power and the responsibility to stop the Regime.

To recap, 30 June 1934 began a 3-day murder spree in which the SS, the Schutzstaffel, or armed wing of the Nazi Party, decapitated the SA, or Sturmabteiling, the other armed wing of the Nazi Party, settled scores right and left, and murdered at least one man, music critic Willi Schmidt, by accident. His body was returned to his widow, Kate Eva, in a closed casket with instructions not to open it under any circumstance. A few days later, Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess came to apologize for the mistake and pay her a pension.

But also murdered were conventional conservative politicians, including General Kurt von Schleicher, Adolf Hitler’s predecessor as Chancellor; his wife, Elisabeth; and one of his closest associates, Generalmajor (equivalent to our brigadier, or 1-star, general) Ferdinand von Bredow, head of military intelligence. The Army High Command acquiesced in these specific murders—to include, allowing the SS to confiscate mourners’ wreaths—because they thought this would give them leverage over the regime.

Emasculation is always contemptible as an accusation men levy at women. But if you insist your genitals make you a protector, you must be a protector of those without said genitals—not because they are “yours” but because they are as human as you—otherwise you have emasculated yourself. And so the High Command castrated itself. Or more accurately, smashed its own spine so that it could only look back at the great men of its past, like a once-supple beast, to borrow from Mandelstam.

One of the most potent German complaints against the Versailles Treaty was that it had left Germany heerlos, wehrlos, und ehrlos (disarmed, defenseless, and dishonored) and to a certain extent, the complaint was legitimate. Europe has historically been an extremely violent continent and Germany had enormous experience with that violence—far from always as the aggressor. When the Army High Command accepted the murder of its own, they served notice to every German that the Army would defend no one. They served notice to every German soldier, especially every German officer, that they and their families could be sacrificed by the High Command.

It has been some 40 years since I read Sir John Wheeler-Bennett’s classic study, The Nemesis of Power: the German Army in Politics, 1918-1945, so I suppose I should revisit it. But I am unsure it was well-understood then, or even now, that the High Command’s acceptance of the murder of two of its generals, muted and suppressed resistance to Hitler’s policies on many different levels and in many different ways. Including within the German Army, because although the myth of the Clean Wehrmacht is a pack of lies, there was surprising room for resistance if anyone wanted to resist: a few did, and they lacked support and overhead cover from the highest levels of the command structure.

The result was that the German Army would not, could not, and did not save the German people. Indeed, the German Army left the German people disarmed, defenseless, and eventually, profoundly, deeply, dishonored in the heart of a violent continent whose violence it willfully unleashed against the nation. The women and children of the nation were left completely exposed to the enemy by the profound dishonor of the German Army, whose leadership first betrayed the lives and honor of its soldiers when it refused to protect the conquered in accordance not only with the Conventions, but its own code of conduct.

There is a lesson here for Americans, and it is not just the pre-meditated murders, rapes, and forced pregnancies of prisoners in concentration camps, the murders of citizens such as Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti in the streets. Don’t tell me detainee deaths aren’t pre-meditated, either. Custodial authorities are absolutely responsible for the lives, health, and honor of their prisoners. In the case of disabled prisoners, such as Nurul Amin Shah Alam, the nearly blind Rohingya refugee with little English, whom Border Patrol says it left at a closed donut shop in sub-zero weather, until they are remanded to those who can safeguard them, such as their families: Mr. Alam’s was never notified.

It is that the military has always tolerated unconscionable levels of sexual contempt, culminating in murderous violence, against women (and men who can be used as women) who voluntarily shouldered the burden of military service. It is broken at its core.

In Germany, you lived under surveillance, and you could rarely be sure those you spoke to, wouldn’t turn you in. Sometimes class and caste and regimental affiliation provided some protections. Sometimes they didn’t. Ernst Jünger, the complex and contradictory author of In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel) and his brother Friedrich Georg, quit the Traditionsverein der 73er, the Hanoverian regimental association of their combat service in World War I when it expelled its Jewish members—but they saved no lives. (Ernst would do that later in Paris.)

We live in a surveillance state every day being drawn tighter around us, while the Tyrant who presumes to rule us denounces Democrats and democrats and republicans more largely as “human garbage,” and otherwise adopts he language of genocide. And make no mistake, this is what this Regime is trying to provoke, its base having been conditioned to see everyone not like them, everyone outside their cult as existential threats to themselves. And they know how to denounce people, knowing fully well that the Regime defines opposition to, rejection of, dissent from their vision of America is a white Christian nationalist patriarchy, as terrorism. The Regime encourages them to do so.

Many men don’t realize how serious this is because they are men. While white Americans voted for the Tyrant, 55% to 43%, White men vs White women voted for him 59 vs 51%.¹ Any other way you slice the demographic pie, men voted for the Tyrant and the Regime at higher rates than women.² There are plenty of women who voted for the Tyrant because they, too, are reprehensible human beings: that is what it means when you say, “I like his policies.” But there is some percentage of women who voted for the Tyrant and the Regime because of coercion by the men in their lives: we don’t know how many, or if it was decisive, but we know they exist. And if you also define coercion as patriarchal brainwashing—the deliberate destruction of women’s honor and self-respect by men and their own Quisling Handmaids—as you should—the percentage of women who voted for the Regime and their Tyrant is absolutely decisive.

Women are millennia-long used to being intensely surveilled. By men. Including men who consider themselves liberal or progressive. By Quisling women on behalf of men, who can neither conceive of another way to survive and want nothing better for other women. By ourselves, through the prism of the internalized male gaze. We are surveilled from the outside in to enforce our submission to male dominance so the men in our own lives, our own homes, our own beds, can extract our labor—economic, emotional, physical, productive, reproductive, and sexual—to better their own lives. And this is in addition to paid labor outside the home, which we, like the men in our lives, perform. We’re used to being terrorized and tortured and murdered by men without recourse, especially if we try to equalize the distribution of labor inside our homes. We’re used to being punished for defending ourselves and protecting our children. We’re used to these men bartering and brokering, trading, selling, giving, and stealing us: and never called slavery. We’re used to men we deeply trusted and loved betraying us in the most profound and dangerous, even deadly, ways possible.

We never know who will beat or rape or murder us because we respect ourselves and other women. Because they led us to believe we could trust them with our desire for them. Because we simply said No. Or even Eeww. Or you’re ugly and your mother would be ashamed of the way you smell, dress, and act. Because we existed. Because our excellence threatened them. Some of them, we married, thinking the mask they took off when we did them the honor of conceiving by them, was who they really were. We do have a very good idea who because of that last will sexually harass, discriminate against us, and steal our work and take credit for it: we work with them.

This betrayal was codified in laws enabling men to sell their wives and children—their private slaves—into slavery to other men approximately 5,000 years ago, because law codifies custom. Indeed, men were and are still allowed to murder them. Women were the first slaves, and we are still little more than human animals for men to use, and this was, and is, the foundation of all authoritarianism, all totalitarianism. Our daughters have never been able to escape. Because of their genitals, their fathers offered our sons the chance of escape from their shared humanity with women, but the cost is, was, and always be betrayal: of their mothers and sisters, and thus of themselves. Not their fathers: their fathers betrayed them, and forced them to choose their fathers over their mothers, which is to say, to choose death over life.

This is not to say that there were never men who made a separate peace with their wives and daughters, their mothers and sisters, their female friends. But these relationships were always gifts women and girls had to be grateful for, never their rights as human beings to live with the same freedom, honor, dignity, rights, that men had, the men who granted them those privileges deriving absolutely unearned respect for treating women like the human beings we are.

And how many of those men in our lives can we trust?

We, American women, live in a society where most men watch, and masturbate to orgasm, to violent porn of women—meaning us—being poisoned (“drugged”) into unconsciousness, hit, choked, spit upon, flogged, raped in many different ways, and god knows what other physical and psychological tortures men can dream up. Masturbate to videos and photos taken of us and shared, to incest “fantasies,” to ourselves sexualized in every possible context and every possible way. Orgasm is the reward for endorsing this sexualized hate of ourselves: orgasms they re-enact on the bodies of the girls and women in their lives—including in those photos and videos.

The CNN report about a specific porn website—apologists for rape deliberately and dramatically understate the true numbers from the website itself—was just the tip of a very visible iceberg. The gorgeous, generous writer Andrea Dworkin, who warned us all those decades ago about porn and woman-hating, was not wrong: Julius Streicher was rightly hanged at Nuremberg for far less than what is now a multi-billion dollar industry.

Sage just published “Isolate, Inebriate, Intimidate, Repeat: High Rates of Sexual Force Against Women Are Reported When Young Men Given Anonymous Surveys.” Using anonymous surveys of 2,689 U.S. and Canadian men (18–34  years)—and we have every reason to believe the sample is representative—95.1% attempted to rape women in just the past four years: meaning, tried to have sex with women they knew did not want to have sex with them. This first layer of horror is where rape begins. Consent without desire is irrelevant because girls grow into women knowing boys and men will harm and even murder them if they refuse.

Sixty-five (actually 64.9 but I’m not writing that out) percent of these would-be rapists were successful rapists. Most rapists said they got something good out of their rapes, including on-going sexual contact with their victims. Of course, the victims not being surveyed, they can’t tell us if they thought this was a positive development, but confused self-loathing combined with great emotional and often physical pain is frequent. Some 1900 men reported no negative (for them) consequences of their rapes. Only one reported an attempt to intervene, and only three faced accusations or charges. (Statistically none were charged.)

So like all women, I struggle to trust men, for all the reasons in the statistics behind the porn and rape—prostitution—industries. How many of my fellow citizens consider themselves liberal or progressive men but would denounce as terroristic women who vocally oppose rape and the traditional family values upon which it feeds? The more so since the President is a rapist and his cabinet riddled with them. Because liberal and progressive men are still men: they still want power over women.

In short, throughout most of human history, women have lived within the Night of the Long Knives. We are surveilled, we cannot trust, and our compliance may or may not ensure our survival.

And now men are worried that this may apply to them while refusing to acknowledge, women are subjugated by men so other men can prey upon them both. While the oligarchs who presume to rule us, such as the Tyrant, or Peter Thiel—and the evangelical and Catholic churches, the Jewish rabbis, the Muslim imans and the Buddhists have no clean hands—bankroll propagandists of rape and slavery, torture and murder of whom Andrew Tate is only the most prominent.

These men, and they are overwhelmingly men, dress up their ambitions in pseudo-intellectual language like the Palantir Manifesto or, for that matter, Mein Kampf. It is important to understand, these men have holes in their souls that nothing can fill except human pain. They talk about shareholder value and technological hard power and god knows what else, and they use money to keep score because they have no virtues or skills, such as the ability to write a beautiful poem or paint a mediocre painting. But they lust to degrade and destroy other human beings, especially those witness to what reprehensible human beings they themselves are. And the bargain they make men is, no matter how we have debased and degraded you, you will get your very own slave(s) to debase and degrade. Your woman, and her children. Sons as well as daughters: and the bargain you will make your sons is, Someday, son, all this will be yours.

Most men will take that bargain. I wish it were not so, but human history gives me no grounds for confidence: as a sex class, there is absolutely no degradation men will not subject themselves to, if in turn, they can subjugate women. They would rather rule women in hell than partner with women as true equals in heaven.

And I do not know how to live in that world. I do not know that any woman does. Even the worst Quisling amongst us did not create this world, she is merely trying to survive it.

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patterns-in-the-2024-election/

2. https://cawp.rutgers.edu/blog/gender-differences-2024-presidential-vote