If John Balentine considered what was happening in Germany at the time of the rise of Hitler he might not be so confident that the Constitution and our other founding documents ensure that our rights are “unassailable.” Intellectuals and others thought the same at that time. As Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer who fled to America in the mid 1930s wrote in his 1941 memoir, “The World of Yesterday,” Germany was a democracy, a nation ruled by laws, where its citizens believed that one’s “liberty and equal rights was secured by the solemnly affirmed constitution.” Hitler “elevated lying to a matter of course.” He and his propagandists also had alternative facts. And they, too, were believed.

Zweig wrote “that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of the great movements that that determine their times.” Let’s not do the same.

Bob Stevens
Freeport