Swear you love us
God, that’s a fiendish detail.
The children have been through hell. They are babies who were carried across rivers and toddlers who rode for hours in trucks and buses and older kids who were told that a better place was just beyond the horizon.
And now they live and wait in unfamiliar places: big American suburban houses where no one speaks their language; a locked shelter on a dusty road where they spend little time outside; a converted Walmart where each morning they are required to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, in English, to the country that holds them apart from their parents.
They are required to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance in English. What the hell is that??! The whole point is that they’re likely to be expelled from the country where their parents tried to find refuge, yet in their horrible prison they’re forced to stand and swear a loyalty oath to the place that’s treating them like criminals before throwing them out? Why not just make them kneel on the floor and kiss the boots of their captors? It would at least be less hypocritical.
Arbeit macht frei?
@1,
Trump is an abomination, but let’s not godwin this. The children at Auschwitz were summarily gassed and incinerated in ovens. In fact they were generally kept with their mothers so they wouldn’t cry out.
@2, you’re largely right of course. Then again, the Nazi’s and countless other dictatorial regimes didn’t start straight out with gassing and mass murder. They started small, with just the sort of actions we see now. In a robust democracy people who start behaving in this way get slapped down and shunned. In a weak democracy we see a gradual slide of such behaviour into normality and acceptance, with ever increasingly awful behaviour at the fringe. The slide is gradual and leaves everyone wondering how the population of a modern civilised country could behave that way. Think of this as the mid 1930’s. We’re not in 1939 yet, but if things tip the wrong way…
Precisely.
The good news is we’re not even as far as the mid-30s yet, because the Nazis started simply locking up leftists of all kinds immediately, and that’s not happening here.
But. We’re sliding sliding sliding.
Godwin weighs in:
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-godwin-godwins-law-20180624-story.html
populous = population btw.
Sorry about abbreviation! ;-)
Ha! Those I don’t mind, unless I don’t know wtf they are. (Phil Dunphy [Modern Family] thinks wtf=why the face.)
Family values party?
There have been several “genocides” since the advent of the 20th century (Namibia, Armenia, Rwanda… more recently Sudan, the Yazidis in Iraq, Syria today…), but none on the enormous, pan-national scale of the Holocaust. It remains exceptional in so many ways, in particular the extermination machinery (the trains, gas chambers, ovens, medical experiments), and the sheer industrial dimension of the slaughter. In my experience, references to Auschwitz (i.e. “Arbeit macht frei”) serve more to minimize its unique horrors than move us to beware more mundane tyrannies.
Helene, again, you’re right, but the genocide didn’t start that way did it? Is the current state of US government encouraged discourse and behaviour a good thing? Is the trajectory of that government behaviour and language positive? Before answering that last, maybe apply the “if I were on the receiving end” test.
We’re witnessing the result of a 30-40 year slide in political discourse. Maybe things will improve, maybe not. One of the lessons of history is that all too often it takes a paroxysm of violence for a society to take stock. Even then, it often requires one side to be utterly defeated.
At what point would you say it is appropriate to start drawing parallels and discussing warnings?
Personally, I’m not just concerned about what happens in the US and Europe, but contagion. one of our political parties (the conservative ones no surprise) have been importing RNC operatives to advise them on tactics. It’s been very effective. It’s also led to a subtle but noticeable shift in phrasing, behaviour and reasoning. Political speech has become much more ‘spun’ than it was 20 years ago. Politicians from that party are much less likely to concede the essential truth of a statement and instead have begun to elide facts and discussion in a way that I’m sure Americans who follow politics would recognise. This has pushed many in opposition parties to adopt similar tactics and almost immediately the result is that supporters of parties become tribal in their response to criticism. Political discussion falters but political shouting gets louder. In this environment fringe and previously unacceptable voices begin to gain airtime. When do we stop being quiet passive little liberals and start pointing out the degeneration of our democracy?
Helene, I should add, I’m not trying to get at you. It’s just that I genuinely do not think it is histrionic or hyperbolic to point out the similarities in the early stages of these events. I don’t understand your apparent tone trolling. Surely the only good thing to come from the horror of the Holocaust is that it acts as a resounding bell of warning down through history. It’s too late to cry out once balls start rolling.
Rob is right. There are worrying parallels between what happened in Germany in the 1930s and what is happening in the US today. That does not mean that what happened in Germany will happen in the US, but it should make people think, and re-evaluate how things are going in the US.
I also agree with Rob, except I think he is wrong that it has been the past 30-40 years. The slide has been longer than that, and began actually early in the history of the US. I am currently reading “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life”, which came out 55 years ago, and there is a lot in there that would set off AHA moments for people as we see how this incivility of discourse and the use of spin and hyperbolic rhetoric has been part of our history since the early days of the republic. There have been a few periods that were better than others, but in the main, our entire political life in this country has been leading to this moment.
Throughout my life, I’ve heard pundits proclaiming that the American voter wanted the “nice” candidate, even as I have watched the “nice” candidate vilified and voted down. We have had ugly campaigns that were led by deeply nasty people and have propelled people into the White House that were less qualified and much less nice. Reagan and his welfare queens? Race baiting. Dubya, with his water boarding and his arrogant superiority over those of us who were “reality based” thinkers? Nixon, with…everything? These are not the beginnings. Candidates who believed in robbing the poor to give to the rich have been normal throughout our history, as have those who locked up dissenters (Sedition Acts), promoted business interests over the welfare of the citizen, and allowed nastiness to happen on their watch. The Democratic presidents have significant amounts of blood on their hands, too, it’s just that the Republicans make it so blatant and seem to enjoy it so much.
This is not a short slide. This is a long trajectory, beginning with the election of the first president, a man who was deemed worthy because he had been the leading general in a long and bloody war.
I love that book. It explains so much.
About this whole godwin thing…Saying “Arbeit macht frei?” is not saying Trump is exactly like Hitler or even the US now is exactly like Germany in 1933 or 1944. What I take Seth’s point to be is the similar juxtaposition of brutal rights-violating imprisonment and pious verbiage. The two are similar. Nobody is saying “therefore within the next 12 years Trump will exterminate many millions of people.”