Never Again?

My family escaped the Holocaust.  They were never really in danger from it.  My maternal ancestors emigrated to New York in the 1880s, and my paternal grandparents came here from Ukraine in 1890.  We all know the stories; we have heard them from so many of our friends and acquaintances over the years who did escape the horror.  As a boy, I grew up with these stories and studied them in school.  And even in my youth and twenties and thirties, I looked back at events like Kristallnacht and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and thought to myself, how in the world could people sit by and watch these things take place without any sense of moral revulsion.  How was it possible for the evil force of Naziism to gain purchase in Germany and Europe?  There are plenty of tales, novels and films that demonstrate and exhibit the power of Hitler and how his charisma and power was able to overwhelm what I thought should have been a moral certainty that could have stopped it all.  I never really was able to comprehend how that sinister force could take hold in a nation and silence righteousness and civilized thought. 

Until now......

 

The force that is stalking our land now is clearly similar.  This is a force and a movement that is based on lies--lies that are furthered endlessly by a group of people who are not believers in truth based on facts.  These lies are not new, they have been in our consciousness for the last 50 years on an increasing

basis.  "Mainstream Republicans and conservative commentators have been pushing the idea that Democrats can only win elections through fraud for decades.  These beliefs rest on racist and nativist tropes that date back to Reconstruction in the South and Tammany Hall in the North", writes Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times today.  He details examples of Republican accusations of fraud that have happened increasingly over the years in tandem with increasing Republican efforts to suppress voter registration and prevent voters being able to vote at the polls, specifically targeted to locations with majority black and brown voters.

 

Enter Donald Trump 6 years ago with his relentless attacks on the Democrats, peddling lies about everything from stealing elections to fomenting violence (which is really ironic given last week).  Over the past 5 years, starting with Trump's lies about Obama being not born in America and ending with his steady lies about the election being stolen, all his allies and conservative media relentlessly repeated the lie that has essentially brainwashed millions of people, including racists, white supremacists, anti-semites, conspiracy theorists and all manner of not very bright impressionable supplicants who bought into his endless rage and incitement.  He and the rest of the Republican Party kept repeating the lies after the 2020 election, even in the face of clear evidence that there was no fraud, no stealing of the election.  Senators and Representatives are so afraid of Trump and his ability to somehow ruin their political careers that they all kept on promulgating the lies.

 

Trump seethed with increasing rage and his sycophants followed suit, professing the veracity of a lie that had no evidence....still has no evidence to support any of it.  As the process of the electoral college verification followed its inexorable path toward conclusion on January 6th, Trump tried at every step to enlist his followers and the conservative media to shout the lie from every platform he could muster.  He sent his lackey Guilliani out to file over 60 lawsuits to overturn the election, all of which the courts rejected for lack of evidence or just because they were just plain stupid.  But that didn't deter the Republicans from repeating the lie, using the lie to sanctimoniously object to the counting of the Electoral votes in an attempt to overturn a legal election, blaming the Democrats for  'stealing the election'.  The Republicans unabashedly supported the invalidation of the votes of over 10 million people.  They decided that the Constitution was invalid as far as they were concerned.  The people were, and still are in the case of over half the Republican caucus, prepared to claim that Joe Biden is not legitimately the incoming President.  You ask them how they can believe that and they say, "Everyone knows it!!"  In reality, all these legislators know that it is a lie and still they try to use it for their own political benefit.  They continue to lie to their constituents.  Why?  They are afraid Trump's base will not re-elect them or they are just riding the lie for their own political motives--people like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz.

 

Anyone with a modicum of intelligence and a belief in the incontrovertible truth simply based on facts, has to be able to know what is real.  That is what is so inconceivable about the position taken by so many Republicans.  One could almost forgive the blind lemming-like acceptance of the Big Lie by so many people who simply choose to only listen to the sources of news and information that are feeding them

this mendacity constantly.  But the country's legislators?  Even after the horrific attack on the Capitol by Trump's legions; even after the deaths of 6 people and the emerging evidence that this insurrection was planned and fomented by Donald Trump, the Republican legislators continue to tell their constituents the Big Lie--even after all that!--they still stand for the insurrection, the overturning of an election, the denial of their solemn oath.  Of course they know better!

 

And so, as we all listen to the unfolding news accounts and see the buildup of security around the Capitol in advance of projected further insurrection by the domestic terrorists unleashed by the President and the Republican sycophants, it is actually easy to see how Hitler manipulated his followers to roundup Jews, overthrow governments, incite his followers to ignore truth and believe the lies he told them over and over again.  Only this time I am not just listening

to a story from history.  I am living it.  I am seeing these frenzied lie-believers on Facebook...some of them are even related to me! I look at their posts that want us to say a prayer for their beloved President Trump whose election was stolen from him and them....and I am at a loss.  Now I see what the Jews in Germany must have felt as they watched their world crumble into an increasingly fraught horror show.

 

Our legislators in Congress are fearing for their lives.  Many of them were almost assassinated last week.  Our streets in Washington and in our state capitols are lined with National Guard troops and people are fearful.  Our democracy is at risk and our Constitution has been rejected by a significant portion of our countrymen.  They all think of themselves as patriots who are saving the election for their aggrieved President...only they are not patriots.  They are insurrectionists, seditionists supporting the overturning of a free and fair election.  They are following a mob who only want to kill people and overthrow our government and replace it with.....what?  With Trump?  With autocracy, dictatorship?  These people don't believe in democracy anymore.

 

I am afraid.