A Word of Warning
We live in a frightening time.Around the world fascism is once again on the rise. For decades the major political parties in Germany were the relatively conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the more progressive Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the successor of the old German socialists. Today it is the CDU and something called Alternative for Germany, a neo-fascist party that demonizes immigrants and advocates the supremacy of Germans and German culture. A similar thing has happened in Italy, where neo-fascists win elections and condemn immigrants. Hungary is ruled by a neo-fascist prime minister. So is Turkey. Other nations of central Europe are experiencing similar things. Russia is ruled by a reactionary authoritarian president who has severely restricted freedom of the press and centralized authority in the Kremlin in a way it had not been since the demise of communism in 1991. The list of examples could go on and on.
The same thing is happening here in the United States of America.In 2016 we Americans made the American fascist Donald Trump our president. (For a discussion of how Donald Trump is a fascist see the post "American Fascist" elsewhere on this blog.) In his campaign and in his term as president he has attacked the free press, even calling it the "enemy of the people," using Stalin's term for the people he murdered in enormous numbers. Every fascist has a target population on which he or she blames a country's problems though that target population isn't solely responsible for those problems or may not be responsible for them at all.For today's European fascists that target population is primarily immigrants or refugees from Africa or the Middle East. Trump has perhaps taken his cue from them, for his target population is immigrants coming across our southern border from Mexico or Central America. He has called them all murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and terrorists. Never mind that these is no evidence at all to support those specious claims. Every responsible, knowledgeable person who speaks to conditions on our border with Mexico today says there is no crisis there. The numbers of people coming across that border has been declining steadily for some time now. Under international law every person has a legal right to enter a country of which she is not a citizen to seek asylum. But there being no crisis on our southern border doesn't suit Trump's fascist political purposes, so he insists in the face of all the facts that there is one.
Trump's false attacks on immigrants remind me of something I experienced during the 1957-1958 academic year when I was eleven years old. My family and I lived in Berlin, Germany, that year. My father, a history professor, was doing historical research there that year. We rented rooms in a large apartment from a German woman named Annamarie. She was a widow, her husband having died before we met her. He had been a Nazi. The real thing. A member of the National Socialist Party of Germany. Annamarie still had his party uniform hanging in a closet in the apartment we shared with her. I don't remember how the subject came up. We really never discussed politics with her, but I will never forget the time when she said to us: "Yes, it is too bad what happened to the Jews, but then something did have to be done." That statement is of course factually false. Nothing had to be done about Germany's Jews. They weren't the problem Hitler made them out to be. Beyond that, it isn't that something "happened" to the Jews under the Nazis. German people like Annamarie or at least her deceased Nazi husband murdered them in their millions. As is so often the case, Annamarie's use of the passive voice in her statement ("what happened to the Jews") was a way of avoiding responsibility for what her nation had done. What the Germans did to the Jews (and not just the Jews but other people like homosexuals and the disabled that they hated as well) wasn't "too bad." It was one of the worst moral outrages of human history. Annamarie, of whom we were otherwise quite fond, like so many other Germans reduced the horrific moral atrocity they had perpetrated to being "too bad what happened to the Jews." There's the banality of evil we hear about coming from the mouth of an otherwise quite pleasant and interesting woman.
I don't mean to suggest that Donald Trump is planning a new Holocaust. I don't believe that. Nonetheless Annamarie's "It's too bad what happened to the Jews, but something did have to be done" is nonetheless a real word of warning to us. The way Trump is using immigrants to our country as his target population on which to blame our country's problems is parallel to the way Hitler started the anti-Jewish policies of his government that culminated in the Holocaust. Desperate people fall for fascist lies like these far too easily. Many Americans are desperate today. The world is changing. Indeed, it has changed; and many people experience that change as negative, as disadvantageous to them and as frightening. Those people's feelings may be understandable, but they also make those people easy marks for charlatans like Donald Trump with his lies about a crisis on our southern border.Trump would never have become president if they were not such easy marks.
So take Annamarie's words to my family and me so many decades ago as a warning to us today. When our government tears apart families at the border. When young children die in our custody. When Trump and his Republican allies work to distract us from real solutions to real problems as they do, we can't just sit here, shrug our shoulders, and say "It's too bad what's happening at the southern border, but then something does has to be done." No it doesn't. Not about the nonexistent problem Trump dummies up to whip up his angry and desperate political base and put one over on the rest of us. What Trump is doing isn't just "too bad." It's immoral. It's frightening. He must be stopped, and we must use very legal, nonviolent means available to us to stop him.
Trump's false attacks on immigrants remind me of something I experienced during the 1957-1958 academic year when I was eleven years old. My family and I lived in Berlin, Germany, that year. My father, a history professor, was doing historical research there that year. We rented rooms in a large apartment from a German woman named Annamarie. She was a widow, her husband having died before we met her. He had been a Nazi. The real thing. A member of the National Socialist Party of Germany. Annamarie still had his party uniform hanging in a closet in the apartment we shared with her. I don't remember how the subject came up. We really never discussed politics with her, but I will never forget the time when she said to us: "Yes, it is too bad what happened to the Jews, but then something did have to be done." That statement is of course factually false. Nothing had to be done about Germany's Jews. They weren't the problem Hitler made them out to be. Beyond that, it isn't that something "happened" to the Jews under the Nazis. German people like Annamarie or at least her deceased Nazi husband murdered them in their millions. As is so often the case, Annamarie's use of the passive voice in her statement ("what happened to the Jews") was a way of avoiding responsibility for what her nation had done. What the Germans did to the Jews (and not just the Jews but other people like homosexuals and the disabled that they hated as well) wasn't "too bad." It was one of the worst moral outrages of human history. Annamarie, of whom we were otherwise quite fond, like so many other Germans reduced the horrific moral atrocity they had perpetrated to being "too bad what happened to the Jews." There's the banality of evil we hear about coming from the mouth of an otherwise quite pleasant and interesting woman.
I don't mean to suggest that Donald Trump is planning a new Holocaust. I don't believe that. Nonetheless Annamarie's "It's too bad what happened to the Jews, but something did have to be done" is nonetheless a real word of warning to us. The way Trump is using immigrants to our country as his target population on which to blame our country's problems is parallel to the way Hitler started the anti-Jewish policies of his government that culminated in the Holocaust. Desperate people fall for fascist lies like these far too easily. Many Americans are desperate today. The world is changing. Indeed, it has changed; and many people experience that change as negative, as disadvantageous to them and as frightening. Those people's feelings may be understandable, but they also make those people easy marks for charlatans like Donald Trump with his lies about a crisis on our southern border.Trump would never have become president if they were not such easy marks.
So take Annamarie's words to my family and me so many decades ago as a warning to us today. When our government tears apart families at the border. When young children die in our custody. When Trump and his Republican allies work to distract us from real solutions to real problems as they do, we can't just sit here, shrug our shoulders, and say "It's too bad what's happening at the southern border, but then something does has to be done." No it doesn't. Not about the nonexistent problem Trump dummies up to whip up his angry and desperate political base and put one over on the rest of us. What Trump is doing isn't just "too bad." It's immoral. It's frightening. He must be stopped, and we must use very legal, nonviolent means available to us to stop him.
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