80 Years Later

I pride myself on being among the last of my circle to compare Donald Trump and the cult of personality surrounding his presidencies to the third reich.  Today, I am reminded of why. On this day 80 years ago, the surviving prisoners of the Holocaust were released from the Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau camps in Poland. Approximately 1.1 million people were killed throughout the 5 years the camp was operational, and on the anniversary of the end to such radical slaughter, I am reminded that people still don’t understand the gravity of what happened, or they do not care. 

Elon Musk performed the Sieg Heil salute on inauguration day, and many defended him. So many people defended him. The people who defended him were the same ones who said that liberals and democrats were antisemites, who would overuse the comparison to the Third Reich in order to score some cheap points, and did not understand the severity of the history and what happened to people at the hands of the Nazi party. 

Donald Trump said that he needed the kind of generals Hitler had, in a private conversation with his former generals that has since been leaked to the Atlantic, which was written off by his supporters as an outrageous lie, but I cannot think of any other reason why serious men who entered into the armed forces to serve this country would be driven to say that about a former president unless it was true. You get to a point with things like this where you can only say someone else is crazy or someone else is the problem so many times before the common denominator shows itself. But that’s not what happened in Nazi Germany, and it is not what is happening in America right now. 

I believed for years that the comparisons between our current leadership in America and the regime of Nazi Germany were too quick to be made. At first, the comparisons were inaccurate. America is full of safeguards to keep something like that from happening, and everyone who expresses a racist thought or racial prejudice is not guilty of being a Nazi. They just aren’t. I’d argue that it takes a lot more than wildly disorganized rhetoric and a comparatively small fraction of people storming the Capitol to create an environment bearing even passing resemblance to what began in Poland 85 years ago. If it seems as though I am minimizing, I do not mean to. Strange as it may seem given that hyperbole is my favorite form of humor, I am exhausted by the exaggerations employed by my fellow Americans who do not like or agree with the new Republican Party, and that those exaggerations almost always come back to the slaughter and imprisonment that took place at Auschwitz. I believe when it comes to matters of tyranny, we all have a responsibility to use the tools at our disposal, and language is our most formidable weapon. Words should be used deliberately, and actually, when you compare the MAGA republicans to the Nazi Party, you are not only minimizing the Holocaust. I believe such language also minimizes the MAGA republicans, and their role in American Politics.

 People still made the comparisons though, and now that they are real concerns, based on real actions, no one is listening anymore, but they should. We should all care as viscerally about this as we do about other historical conflicts that rear their ugly heads once every few decades, because here it is. The instinct to rule over our fellow man and cast out and punish those who are unknown to us is cyclical, and it is among us now. With that kind of leadership comes those who will not support those tendencies to punish people for being different, but they will vote for the other things the punishing person or party wants to do. They don’t support the divisiveness, but it is not a dealbreaker for them either. I know many people feel sadness and grief over the direction the republican party has taken. I am one of them. I can imagine that there were many people in Germany who felt sadness, shame, and loss over what their homeland became during the second world war. 

And still, America is not Nazi Germany. There are alarm bells being rung, I won’t deny that, but there are so many options we have as citizens (are we still citizens? I gotta check) and so much history we can learn from. As I write this, there are 56 survivors of the Auschwitz camp gathering together today to meet with world leaders and royalty, to discuss the rise of that hatred and distrust that made the holocaust they endured possible in the first place. According to them, that unrest is happening again, and not just in America. The silent hatred, they call it, that opens the door for antisemitism, racism, and homophobia to cause massive destruction to people worldwide, is spreading around the globe. 

Here, today, it does not feel so silent, but that is one of the things that I treasure about America, even on the days when being here is hard. We can loudly declare our feelings, our political ideologies, our beliefs. We are guaranteed the right, and we are assured of the privilege of hearing the way our leaders and representatives feel about the most vulnerable of us. Just as it is their right to speak their mind, we also benefit infinitely from listening when they speak. If we want to truly honor this day, and that small but mighty group of survivors, listening must become a priority. We have to start getting our  information from every news source, not just from our favorites, and not from places that might not be in the business of reporting the actual news. We owe it to ourselves and to the people who came before us to learn from past failures, and we cannot do that unless we acknowledge that the failures occurred. I’ll go first.

85 years ago, my ancestors were put in camps, and gas chambers, and hunted down by an oppressive regime that incentivised their neighbors and friends to turn on them and inform the government of their whereabouts and activities. This happened because people were complicit participants, even if they did not truly believe in the actions being taken by the Third Reich. Campaigns of propaganda and hatred made that regime possible, and then powerful. My country that has been my home my whole life got involved too late, and antisemitism was prevalent here throughout the conflict. On inauguration day, Elon Musk did the Sieg Heil salute twice, and people all over the country, Gentile and Jewish alike, defended him staunchly. Prior to election day, the opposition party who was in the White House for four years was not successful at combating misinformation and campaigns of hatred, and were ineffectual in putting an end to the power people like Elon Musk have over public opinion. I am not sure how they will recover from that inability to act. 

Those, as I see them, are our failures. There have been many more, and many more will come, but today I am thinking of those in particular. I am wishing for better for all of us, and I wish peace and light to those who survived that unspeakable horror. I hope that they have an enlightened and inspired gathering today, and that the memories of those they lost to tyranny will be a blessing on their meeting.