Bucknam: Sliding toward totalitarianism

Editor’s note: This commentary is by Deborah Bucknam, a St. Johnsbury-based attorney and the vice chair of the Vermont Republican Party.

Two weeks ago, all the members of the Mt. Ascutney School District Board publicly humiliated and punished Windsor School Principal Tiffany Riley for exercising her first amendment rights and her rights under Article 13 of the Vermont Constitution. The school board’s statements made their reasoning clear: They claimed to understand the “struggles of people of color,” and their principal did not. The board stated: “The ignorance, prejudice, and lack of judgement in these statements are utterly contrary to the values we espouse as a school board and district.”

The school board’s actions and their rationale are evidence of a slide toward totalitarianism that should alarm every American. In an utterly patronizing — and one should say, racist — statement, white school board members in the whitest state in the union claim to understand how tens of millions of black Americans think and feel as one solid, unbroken “race” about a political message from a controversial group, Black Lives Matter, which espouses anti-police and anti-family policies. The board decided that they knew what offends every black American, because they concluded that every single black American thinks exactly alike.

Bucknam Law

St. Johnsbury Attorney Deborah Bucknam

The Mt. Ascutney School District Board could come to this extraordinary decision, without shame, in blatant violation of Tiffany Riley’s fundamental constitutional rights because they have been immersed in a dangerous philosophy that is permeating our culture: group guilt and group innocence, the foundational principles of a totalitarian society.

According to totalitarian orthodoxy, individuals, with their unique stories and backgrounds, have no intrinsic value. They are only valued as members of a group. Moreover, totalitarians decide not only what group individuals belong to, but also whether that group is guilty or innocent.

To the Jacobins of revolutionary France, the guilty were members of the clergy, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and ultimately, anyone who questioned the Jacobins’ revolutionary fervor. Jacobins tore down statutes, defaced monuments, and even renamed Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral as the Temple of Reason, in an campaign to wipe out history and obliterate anything connected to the guilty group. They humiliated and silenced opponents, and ultimately terrorized and murdered members of the guilty group, which, as in all totalitarian societies, continued to expand until the guilty ultimately included their own members.

For the Nazis, the guilty were a “race” — the Jews. Jews were guilty of the sins of their ancestors. There was nothing Jews could ever do individually to atone for those sins. Aryans, on the other hand, were the innocent victims of historic Jewish perfidy. Aryans could smash Jewish businesses, kick Jewish women and children down in the streets, and ultimately torture and kill Jews because Aryans were absolved of any individual responsibility as members of an innocent victims group.

Chinese society has had a centuries long tradition of reverence for teachers and learning. However, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, educators were declared to be members of a guilty group. As if on cue in a matter of months, school children humiliated their teachers and principals, requiring them to wear dunce caps, signs around their necks, to kneel in front of the students, crawl on the ground, eat dirt, and to recite “I am a poisonous snake.” In some schools, classrooms were made into jails for teachers, and many teachers were ultimately beaten to death by their students.

Today in America and in Vermont this same premise is desecrating our fundamental rights. White Americans are guilty of white privilege, no matter their background, their ancestry or their personal moral character. Black Americans as a group are innocent victims of white privilege. The individual character of black Americans has no value. We are guilty or innocent on the basis of blood and birth.

Assigning each individual American to a group, and dictating what those group members think and feel is dehumanizing and ultimately, totalitarian. A Vermont lawyer posted a telling comment on Facebook in response to my comments about the violation of Tiffany Riley’s First Amendment rights. She commented about me: “We know what she is.” The message? We are no longer thinking, feeling human beings; we are things — marionettes mouthing words and phrases conforming to edicts of our own group. Black Americans are subject to this same dehumanization.

Do you think that the Vermont lawyer’s words are outliers? Do you think America could never devolve into Jacobin France or the horrors of Nazism or the Cultural Revolution? Think again. France, Germany, and China are some of most civilized countries in the world, with cultural histories far longer and richer than ours. Liberal intellectuals in France, Germany and China never thought such terror would reach their country — until it happened.

How does it happen? Because no one speaks up, perhaps out of fear of being seen as supporting the guilty.

In Vermont, organizations like the ACLU, the Vermont Bar Association, the Agency of Education, the Vermont Medical Society, Vermont Business Roundtable, the Vermont Trooper’s Association, and dozens of state and local leaders from Sen. Leahy to Gov. Scott, to local school boards, issued statements condemning the murder of George Floyd and the group guilt of “systemic racism” behind the atrocity. Not one of these organizations has issued a statement on the unprecedented assault on the First Amendment by the Mt. Ascutney school board. Tiffany Riley’s loss of her career, and her public humiliation as a result of the board’s violation of her right to free speech, is of apparently no moment.

Thugs are tearing down statutes of Ulysses Grant and George Washington and Teddy Roosevelt. They are defacing monuments to Lincoln, black Civil War soldiers and American soldiers, black and white, who liberated Europe. They are humiliating and silencing members of the black community and others who dare question the catechism of Black Lives Matter. The silence in the face of these assaults on our heritage and our fundamental rights is deafening.

It is time to speak up before it is too late.

Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Bucknam Law

13 thoughts on “Bucknam: Sliding toward totalitarianism

  1. I am sorry for Vermont, but it has come down to two personal/political and financial choices. you either “Get Woke” and submit to the Progressive’s totalitarian demands (like plastic bags and FOOD SCRAPS?????)…or you can grab your freedom…and leave. Especially if you are at, or near, retirement age….and upper income. They are coming after you. The voting electorate of VT is a one-way-street” ..it is their crowning culmination of 40 years of the slog to the Progressive’s total takeover. It won’t stop. You can’t change it…get Woke! Handwriting is on the wall. Vermont will be insolvent in the next 3-5 years. And, do you KNOW who they will make pay??? YOU! People who are smart, with assets…get out now…either for “six-months-and-a-day-to- F.L.A.”…or out 100% as I thankfully did. YOU are on this earth only once and on the downhill slope of life. WHY BE MISERABLE AND FINANCIALLY IN FAR WORSE SHAPE…to spend your supposed golden years – paying for everyone else in VT….. a Progressive hell hole. Just do it! you will be much happier!

  2. Deborah Bucknam”s commentary on the Vt slide to totolarianism is spot on!
    I appreciate that she has taken the time to write it .
    If eyeryone in Vermont and the US would take the time to read and think about the current events and the historical facts presented with respect to the state of VT and the US, there may be a chance to prevent repeating history and it’s tragic events. Unfortunately our education system and priority with entertainment and socialmedia do not encourage critical analysis allowing totolatarianism to continue to advance and destroy the freedom our country has fought for.

  3. By chance, my Covid-19 reading list had Charles Dickens’s ‘A Tale of Two Cities,’ which I finished yesterday. While the novel has a wildly complicated plot, his description of the operation of the crowd in Paris, the reliance upon public denunciations, the power of zealots to guide events, and impossibility of appeal against the voice of the mob strike very true.

  4. The objective of some of these rioters seems it is truly to create chaos in an outlet to release pent up anger.
    We can all agree that changes can and must be made if there is no leverage within our system to eliminate those in authority who vow to protect humanity and then abuse and kill.
    There is not a race problem.( focused only on black people)
    There is not even a bad group.
    Truth is… all lives matter and we are in need of a good police force that rids itself of the bad members that do not protect humanity of all color and origin.
    We cannot be pinning any group of people against another group of people. We are all people and as the song states “ we all bleed the same”
    We should not look at color but at character instead.
    It’s a huge mistake to generalize and place any group with many individuals into a pot of vegetable soup and try to say that all of the vegetables are the same.
    The fact is that the country is made up of a variety of different people… we are a “ melting pot” of different beautiful cultures and colors and each one brings a unique contribution.
    There is no room for any person or group of people to judge or categorize anybody.

    • I will try to reply gently.
      “There is not a race problem”

      Then why are a dozen of people of color murdered most weekends in Chicago, New York, Detroit, ?
      murdered by people of a different gang, but of the same ethnicity.?

      The growth of welfare, meant that Black mothers could only collect welfare, if there was no man,
      AKA Father, living in the house. It was presumed, correctly that a man could work to support his family.

      Now Black youth grow up in neighborhoods run by competing gangs. has that become their father figure?

  5. The Mt. Ascutney School Board is being unjustly criticized. It is any easy going bunch who have absolutely no problem with points of which coinsidecwith its thinking. Tell them what they want to hear and all is hunky dory. FREE SPEACH, FIRST AMENDMENT??? What’s that got to do with anything??? These people are pathetic and they overseeing the education (brain washing?) of our children??? Now that is really scary!!

    • Hypocrite! You talk about free speech, but fully support the arbitrary eradication of all our rights in the name of an “emergency.”

  6. Woodrow Wilson’s 1887 essay titled “Socialism and Democracy” nicely sums up the Progressive ideal or belief between the individual and the State:

    “In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals.”

    • Against this Progressive vision of “Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals,” we have from our Declaration of Independence: “…[M]en are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” Unalienable Rights cannot be given or taken by any ‘communities of men’. The Declaration of Independence makes provisions for such attempts: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it,…”

  7. Black Lives Matter (BLM) is not the same as black lives matter. The organization BLM is Marxist to its core. There’s no debate, BLM leaders have stated as much in public and on the record.

  8. Liberals in charge, time to sweep the trash into the gutter !!

    Wake up people, agenda is all they care about, you’re freedom isn’t
    on their agenda, so if you’re not with them than they are against
    you……….

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