Jim Huffman, a CAPA board member, is a scholar of Japanese history and imperialism.
The brutality of ICE agents in Chicago the last few months has brought to mind repeatedly lessons we should have learned decades ago when respectable, peace-loving citizens responded “sensibly” to rising authoritarianism in Germany and Japan before World War II.
On January 31, 1931, a New York Times editorial said people need not worry much about Adolf Hitler because the German cabinet would stop him “if he sought to translate the wild and whirling words of his campaign speeches into political action.”The country’s establishment, the writers said, was strong enough to insure democracy’s survival.
And once he was in power, the vast majority of Christian Aryans, including lawyers, judges, and religious leaders, stood by while Jews, gays, and Roma were driven from their homes, imprisoned, and killed, because the atrocities were carried out legally.
In Japan, where the oft-censored journalist Kiryu Yuyu wrote in 1935 that a coming conflict might spawn “a hopeless war involving the people of literally every country,” moderates saw the times as worrisome but relatively normal. They still could vote, socialize, work, and live as they always had. As late as 1940, U.S. ambassador Joseph Grew reported from Tokyo that liberals “continually maintain that just beneath the surface there exists a great body of moderate opinion ready to emerge and to wrest control from extremists.”
Japan’s leaders in those years may have promoted a kind of ultranationalism that evokes MAGA’s white Christian nationalism, but they did so within the constraints of the law. While a few protested and some went to jail, the great majority of Japanese went on with their lives, either approving or ignoring the country’s rightward march.
In hindsight, then, the most troublesome thing about Germany and Japan in those years was, arguably, not the much-discussed threat of war but the failure of moderates and progressives to see rising authoritarianism for what it was—a failure that rendered effective resistance impossible.
Which brings us to Chicago’s (and more recently Minneapolis’) encounter with ICE in recent months.
Few things ever have troubled me more than seeing my fellow Chicagoans abused, imprisoned, and deported, with minimal attention to due process or constitutional guarantees. Profane, club-wielding agents have ripped parents from their children’s arms and sent them to unknown locations. They have thrown protesters to the ground, tied them up, and tossed tear gas cannisters at those around them. They even have killed them.
At the same time, nothing has made me prouder of this city than its response to those agents: the creation of know-your-rights kits, the organization of citizen groups all across the city and its suburbs to accompany immigrant children to and from school, the sounds of whistles when ICE agents appeared, the sight of ministers accepting arrest at the Broadview detention facility, the approving honks when CAPA and other protesters hung banners from freeway overpasses.
But the experiences of the 1930s make me worry about whether this valiant resistance has been enough to save us from the authoritarianism that threatens us today. There are many reasons for my concern, but one of the most important is the public’s reluctance to understand President Donald Trump’s policies for exactly what they are: fascism.
We do not like that word. It has a nasty quality that makes us shiver. To use it is to be considered extreme. Indeed, even the so-called “liberal” media avoid the f-word as though it had only four letters. But Trump has demonstrated repeatedly that he is committed to the central tenets of fascism: authoritarian government and ultranationalism. From Japan and Germany ninety years ago, we must learn that a failure to name such policies forthrightly will take away our ability to overcome them.
A more mundane—but equally fundamental—lesson from the 1930s is that we must engage in non-stop, persistent organizational work to stop the authoritarians and get others to do the same. We must talk to our neighbors, write letters to editors, make calls to politicians and officials, demonstrate and join protest rallies, engage in conversations over meals and in late-night meetings about how to get our message across more effectively. This kind of organizing usually is boring; sometimes it is dangerous; it is always exhausting. But as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man who did see Hitler for what he was, wrote from prison, “the rationalist imagines that a small dose of reason will be enough to put the world right” and when that does not work, he “retires from the fray, and weakly surrenders to the winning side.” Action, he maintained, was necessary, and he paid with his life.
A third lesson from the past may be the most difficult. Although the times are dark, we must hold tightly, even viciously, to hope—for the short term as well as the long term. It is easy to despair; indeed, the very naming of fascism can propel us down the road of despair. But we must resist that road, because only with obstinate hope can we sustain energy needed to continue the struggle.
The song “We Shall Overcome” brought me into the civil rights struggle sixty years ago with its promise of “freedom now.” When I look at ICE agents snatching hard-working gardeners from outside employers’ homes, at pastors being zip-tied and arrested for protesting non-violently, at power-hungry authorities running rough-shod over legal and moral guardrails, it is easy to feel helpless. But obstinate hope must be my anchor—indeed, my propeller—just as it was for Bonhoeffer in the 1940s and for me in the 1960s.
For the material on Ebbutt, see Patrick Cockburn, “Diary,” London Review of Books, October 9, 2025, pp. 48-49.
Kiryu Yuyu’s statement is in his Tazan no ishi (Stones from a different mountain) (Tokyo: Kinokuniya, 1972), p. 171.
For Grew, see Joseph Grew, Ten Years in Japan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944), p. 356.
For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Macmillan Company, 1953), p. 17.