Words matter.
Growing up Jewish, although not really that religiously so, the Holocaust has always been a part of my life. From the earliest memories of Hebrew School and Sunday School, there was the Holocaust.
It starts out simple enough when you're a child. There was a bad man named Adolf Hitler who only wanted there to be people with blond hair and blue eyes, and he didn't like Jews.
When you're older, you see the Allied liberation videos; piles of bodies, starving people, gas chambers. It's all part of a grande story of survival and winning in the end, not unlike the story of Exodus. Everyone's relatives fought in WWII, and now there's the UN and Israel so none of this would ever happen again.
When you're older still, you learn that it really wasn't about blond hair and blue eyes, and that the holocaust happened because an entire industrialized society went mad. How could an entire civilization, one now remarked as a paragon of progress and liberalism, go mad?
The easiest explanation would be that the Germans were just bad people. But you learn this wasn't the case. Yes, antisemitism coursed throughout Europe for close to a millennium. But Jews had lived in Germany for hundreds of years too. You think Adolf Hitler seized power amidst the madness. But you learn he was elected democratically, with about a third of the vote. And then comes the hard part; asking why didn't the Jews just leave if it was so bad? And that's where the answers get really frightening and delve into human nature and creeping horrors.
One of my favorite quotes about the Holocaust was that it wasn't the bad Germans who put us in concentration camps, it was the good Germans.
And so here we are in 2016, wondering what the good Americans are going to do.
America just elected a man who ran on a white nationalist platform of racial resentment. Trump hasn't even been inaugurated yet, and there's talk about concentration camps. Camps for Muslims, for now. Although I'm sure it will come back to the Jews and other historically oppressed groups of people too. It always does. And like it even makes a difference to humanity in the end.
I'm not an alarmist. Well, I like to think I’m not an alarmist. So when I read news of white supremacy and fascism in an American presidential administration, I tend to dismiss it. Most importantly, I want to dismiss it. But when I start making excuses for Trump, they are the same excuses Germans made for the Nazis.
Donald Trump is just a populist buffoon pandering to the masses who has no intent to follow through on any of what he says...Those exact words were said by the establishment when Hitler was elected.
The media would never allow such developments in America...The hallmark of this election was the dissemination of false news and propaganda, overwhelmingly from one side.
If he goes too far, he will not be reelected...Who said there's going to be another election? Well, another fair one. We already saw a foreign power interfere in this election, along with federal law enforcement in gross violation of the Hatch Act and every political norm. How would any opponent to Trump or Trumpism resist criminalization by a Trump FBI and DoJ? We saw a bullshit story about e-mail turn into a month's long scandal. What's to stop the next challenger from being smeared with ever greater nonsense?
It would be illegal...Says who? We've seen fringe legal theories become law because the right says so. Who's going to stop this? The Trump Supreme Court will make the laws.
And that's what's so disturbing: My rational mind too desperately wants to say the Republicans aren't Nazis. Even the Nazis weren't like Nazis. Lightning doesn't strike twice. But every excuse I make for them is an excuse Germans made for the Nazi party. Until it was too late.
Donald Trump played with forces to assume power that I have good reason to fear he cannot and will not control. History has taught us ethnic nationalism is a Pandora's Box.
The one thing we've learned from Trump is that this is no reality TV act. He is a very damaged person. I think even his supporters would agree to some extent. This is a pathologically narcissistic and ill-tempered man completely ill-suited to the office who intends to be our first dictatorial/autocratic President in 224 years.
So what happens when things start to go wrong here? What happens when the economy begins to turn down? Or more importantly, when there's a terror attack on Trump’s watch? Who's going to be to blame? Not the Donald.
There needs to be a scapegoat. And in Germany, the times between the Reichstag Fire (February 1933), the Nuremberg Laws (September 1935), Kristallnacht (November 1938), and Genocide were astonishingly short, even by modern standards.
People want to believe there will be a happy ending here, that if things head south, this will all play out like World War II. Germany, for all the ten's of millions killed, was actually rather limited, militarily, compared to America today. We have a nuclear arsenal. So if things do go bad here, and that's a big if, who's gonna save us? No one.
Maybe if we're lucky, we'll just slip into 46 years of apartheid like South Africa.