By Nick Gier | FAVS News Columnist
The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News.
What did we learn from the Holocaust?
We have to act and we have to resist.
— Rabbi Diane Tracht protesting in Minneapolis
It’s looking more like Nazi Germany every day.
— One sign among 150 rabbis protesting in D.C.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz caused quite a stir recently with this statement: “We have children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading the story of Anne Frank.”
Ambassador Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, Donald Trump’s antisemitism envoy, charged that Walz, in making this comparison, “cheapens the horror of the Holocaust.” He also added that the Frank family, unlike our undocumented migrants, “was in Amsterdam legally and abided by Dutch law.”
The good rabbi’s statement is odd, even obtuse, as well as historically incorrect. As of November 1941, a Nazi law made German Jews anywhere illegal aliens. On July 5, 1942, Anne Frank’s sister Margo was ordered to report for deportation to the death camps. She refused and the stateless Frank family became refugees in the backroom of their own home.
A scholar’s case for applying Holocaust lessons today
Joel Swanson, professor of Jewish Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, formulates the issue in a recent Religion Dispatches article this way: “The claim isn’t that Minneapolis under ICE occupation is exactly the same as Nazi Germany. The claim is that systems of bureaucratic cruelty justified by legality aren’t historical aberrations.”
Swanson continues: “When every analogy is denounced as distortion, when every contemporary reference is treated as sacrilege, Holocaust memory becomes something to be commemorated but never acted upon. Remembered, but never allowed to indict present systems of power.”
This is Gov. Walz’s position as well. His master’s thesis was on Holocaust education, and he believed that the Holocaust should be taught “in the greater context of human rights abuses.” If it is not, students are denied the knowledge of “the causes of genocide in all parts of the world.”
Drawing on the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, Swanson argues that “treating the Holocaust as absolute evil severs genocide from the political, legal, and administrative processes that actually produced it. When atrocity is mystified, it’s no longer understood as the outcome of decisions made by identifiable actors operating within institutions, bureaucracies, and states. This isn’t fidelity to history; it’s a refusal to learn from it.”
Former Joint Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley once said that Donald Trump is “fascist to the core.” Former Trump Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly agreed that Trump fits “the general definition of fascist.” When Kelly heard Trump say that Hitler “did some good things (for example) he rebuilt the economy,” he was shocked that Trump said nothing about the Holocaust.
The military muscle behind the rhetoric
Once in power Adolf Hitler declared that “the enemy within” must be confronted, so he ordered the brown-shirted Stormtroopers (already established in 1921) to harass and arrest Jews, Communists, Socialists and trade unionists.
Likewise, Trump has declared that “the enemy from within is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.” In the same interview he said, “They should be very easily handled by … the military.”
There are now 22,000 poorly trained, undisciplined ICE agents marauding in our streets. During the siege of Minneapolis, Trump put 1,500 army troops on call for further action there if needed. He also ended his National Guard deployment to three cities after the Supreme Court recently ruled 6-3 that the president didn’t have enough evidence to justify this in Chicago.
Trump is on record saying the following: “I will get rid of the communist vermin,” and that “migrants are poisoning the blood of our country.” Ominously, he declared “one people, one family, one glorious nation,” also adding “under God.”
The parallels to Hitler are frightening. Similar to Trump, he referenced communists as pests, by vowing to “crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.” He also said Jewish blood is “poisoning” the Aryan race. And, most famously, his approved propaganda in Germany regularly stated, “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer” (“One People, One Realm, One Leader”).
In a 1990 Vanity Fair interview with Trump’s first wife Ivana, she said that Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches in a bedside cabinet. She said this while they were divorcing and Trump has since denied.
A recruiting notice by the Department of Homeland Security has the banner “We’ll have our home again,” a lyric in a modern white nationalist anthem. The Department of Labor promotes a video containing the motto “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.” We now have a fascist government.
With the support of the Jewish sources above, I would like to propose a wider meaning of “never again.” Remember that Joseph Stalin was responsible for at least 6 million deaths; Mao Zedong ordered the execution of 2.5 million landlords; and U.S. saturation bombing brought in the Pol Pot regime where an estimated 2.8 million Cambodians were murdered. Never again!
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