27 January—To celebrate Wolfgang Mozart’s 269^th birthday, today’s Republican-American published the results of yesterday’s poll, “Would you protect someone (a friend, neighbor, family member) who is undocumented?: “No . . . 61%; Yes . . . 27%; I don’t know . . . 12%”

Given the decidedly benighted pro-Trump populace of the area, reflected in the RA’s readership, the poll figures aren’t surprising. But they’re none the less disappointing and rather worrisome: a disgraceful plurality of six-tenths of the people around here would actually turn in friends, neighbors, and family members for lack of documentation. That’s what happens in dictatorships.

Characteristics common to authoritarian, totalitarian governments—dictatorships—include rule by decree rather than law, actual or virtual deification of tyrants (i.e., worship by cults of personality), imposed ideology, intimidation, control of media and borders, corruption, and trickle-down paranoia from the tyrants to the oppressed masses. Of course, it couldn’t happen here.

Paranoia in government, starting with the tyrant himself, gives rise to delators. A delator (directly from the Latin) is an informer, an accuser, a denouncer, a snitch, a stoolie, a betrayer. Like the 61 percent in the survey who’d betray friends, neighbors, and family members. (We won’t go into the nuances of moles and whistleblowers.) In simple terms, everybody spies on everybody else for fear of being accused of not spying and being punished for it.

Because he didn’t have Facebook on his cell phone in Ancient Rome, Octavian employed delatores (the nominative plural of delator in Latin) from all strata of society—from slaves to patricians—to keep him informed of what his enemies and friends (mostly friends, because he’d had his enemies rubbed out) were up to as he was guilefully transforming the Republic of Rome, already a dictatorship under his great-uncle Julius Caesar, into the Empire of Rome with himself as the first emperor and dictator, to be known as Augustus.

Henry VIII employed delators in and out of his court, and not only to snitch on his wives.

Joseph Stalin and his successors in the Soviet Union depended on delators to keep abreast of all the plots against their communist regimes. In the USSR everyone was an informer. Is it any less bad in Putrid’s wannabe Soviet Russia?

Adolf Hitler’s Nazis famously required Germans to turn in anyone who spoke against the Nazi party, its leaders, or the government (one and the same). And the Nazis set up special kangaroo courts expressly to try and convict the “malicious rabble-rousers with base mentality,” as Hitler called his critics.

You’d better believe that our own beloved federal government doesn’t lack for delators, voluntary or otherwise. Just last week, in fact, Donald Trump’s satrap in the Office of Policy and Management instructed government employees to turn in suspected DEI employees in a timely manner or else.

Here’s how the disgraceful OPM memorandum puts it (among other abominations): “There will be no adverse consequences for timely reporting this information. However, failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.” [Editorial emphasis]

No matter what you may think of DEI, is that really necessary? Given the deranged, paranoid dictator in the White House, of course, that’s a silly question . . .