“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”― J.R.R. Tolkien“The Two Towers”

When we look back on eras of totalitarianism, our greatest condemnation is reserved for the collaborators. Those who sought to promote themselves, or save themselves, by throwing in with the dictators and the occupiers.

Names that live in infamy include those who ran puppet governments of countries under Nazi control — Norway’s Quisling, France’s Pétain.

French Marshal Philippe Pétain was a hero of World War I and when Nazi Germany rolled into Paris in 1940 he was installed by Hitler as dictator of the half of the country the stormtroopers hadn’t yet occupied. It was a nominally independent land formally called the French State but generally referred to as Vichy France because Petain set up his fascist shop in the spa town of Vichy.

That’s why Captain Renault proclaims his transfer of loyalty by so contemptuously throwing a bottle of Vichy Water into the trash at the end of “Casablanca”.

Today we wonder if we are living in a place that will later be known as Vichy Utah.

Bidden by nothing but an apparent desire to please his master, Riverton Mayor Trent Staggs has signed a formal deal with President Trump’s stormtroopers, aka ICE. That agreement basically subsumes Riverton Police into a renegade federal agency that has distinguished itself in recent weeks by sending masked goons to arrest concert violinists, legal residents who showed up for their immigration hearings and firefighters on the front lines.

Staggs thus violates the first law of resisting fascism, as formulated by today’s foremost scholar of democracy and tyranny, Timothy Snyder:

Do not obey in advance.

The most obsequious of Utah’s Quislings, though, is Sen. Mike Lee.

Lee was never much use to his constituents, having never passed any meaningful legislation or stood up to protect our air, water, public lands or democracy. These days Lee does little but suck up to Trump, worshipfully tweeting and basking in his hero’s presence.

Lee’s latest act of boot-licking has been to introduce legislation to validate Trump’s expensive and absurd move to change the name of the Department of Defense back to what it was before 1949, the War Department.

Trump apparently thinks promoting war makes him sound tough. To him, the brutality is the point, with a constant threat of violence aimed at those who don’t kneel before him, whether in Venezuela or Chicago.

It separates him from a real Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, who said, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity."

Some backstory: As World War II receded into history and the Cold War loomed, President Harry Truman launched a major review of his military establishment. It concluded that the complexities of fighting a global war, plus the intelligence failures that preceded the attack on Pearl Harbor, demanded a new, more unified structure.

The National Security Acts of 1947 and 1949 between them merged the previously separate, and often rivalrous, War and Navy departments under a secretary of defense and created the Central Intelligence Agency.

To portray America as a nation that had no designs on expansionism — unlike, say, the Soviet Union — Congress named the new structure the Department of Defense. Message: The United States does not seek conquest, only the protection of its own territory, allies and interests.

Trump may think “Department of Defense” sounds wimpy. But it is absurd to see as feeble any action taken by Truman — the man who dropped not one, but two, atomic bombs on Japan.

Truman’s changes left more than enough wiggle room to justify military action in Korea and Vietnam, among others. We’ve established more than a few puppet governments of our own. But the principle of being a nation that neither starts wars nor seeks new territories has, mostly, held.

At least until Trump orders the occupation of the Panama Canal or the invasion of Greenland.

Maybe Mike Lee can get a cushy gig as governor of Nuuk.

George Pyle, opinion editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, was struck by the number of monuments to victims and foes of the Nazi occupation found all over today’s Europe.