In a country where historical blindness is somehow considered a political virtue, and the ability to draw moral analogies is seen as "anti-American," it seems to me that the loudest and most powerful Americans have learned just enough about the Holocaust to make the knowledge worse than useless. What most of Trump's fans probably get is that it's bad to put Jews in concentration camps and all Germans should have stood up to the Nazis. Because it was the Jews, and we all know that the Jews are good. How dare you compare the Muslims to the Jews? Everyone knows that all Muslims are terrorists. (Unfortunately, there are Jews who agree with and espouse this logic too, although we should know better.) So, heigh-ho, never again, right? Not on our watch.
But see, here's the thing I think a lot of Americans don't get about the Holocaust and the events that surrounded it--Europeans did not see Jews as white. Jews were the hated other, just as people of color and now Muslims and "illegal immigrants" are here. Even tolerant Gentiles had been brought up steeped in anti-Semitism, the same way American whites are now brought up steeped in racism, whether we personally would like to be racist or not. Anti-Semitism was part of being patriotic to many European Gentiles, the same way hating Muslims has become "patriotic" for many of us. In places where Jews had civil rights, those rights were resented by many as antithetical to the "real" Germany, France, wherever. Not only that, but Europeans within the Nazi occupied territories during WWII were told, just as we are now being told about Muslims and refugees, that Jews were dangerous to national security. They were terrorists and spies. They were vectors of disease, moral and physical (in Poland, the Poles were told that Jews had to be put into ghettos because they all had typhus. This message was accompanied by frightening posters that showed Jews as typhus-carrying lice). Should they have disbelieved this? Perhaps. How many of us disbelieve what we're now being told about Muslims and Syrian refugees on CNN? How many of us aren't buying into the war-mongering? That many, huh? Yeah, I thought so.
The bottom line is, while the American/Israeli version of the Holocaust narrative paints the Jews' fundamental innocence as self-evident, that idea would have been completely radical and non-common-sensical at the time. When Europeans looked at the Jews, they saw people who (so they'd been told) couldn't even be bothered to teach their children proper Russian or German or Polish, who didn't want to assimilate, who only cared about making money and cheating honest Christians. They saw people who it was commonplace to hate and resent, much as it is commonplace among certain groups of white Americans to hate and resent non-whites and Muslims now. And so many Europeans did exactly what Donald Trump and his ilk are doing. They said, no refugees for us (this, of course, was not just Europeans. The US said the same). They said, let's label them so they can't sneak around. They said, let's stamp their passports. Why don't we throw them all into camps. Those were the people Americans and their history books condemn, but those condemnations start to sound incredibly hollow when American presidential candidates repeat the same rhetoric, almost word for word, about another religious group to the sound of applause.
And the heroic Gentiles during WWII, the ones who somehow Americans always imagine that they would of course have been, because it's just plain wrong to discriminate against Jews...they did something the American media, American politicians, and many American voters would vilify today. They looked at these people who might or might not have been terrorists, who all good Germans or French or Italians should hate, who took up all the places at the universities and owned all the businesses and whose skin was probably too dark, and they became "traitors" to their own countries. They offered comfort and sanctuary to the "enemy," in whatever form that took. Because they said to themselves, This is still a human being. And to treat any human being this way is wrong.
I don't think it's crazy to say that the most important moral lesson to be learned from the Holocaust is that treating any human being badly because of his or her race or religion is wrong. Not only wrong, but dangerously seductive in ways that lead ordinary people to do horrific things. America as a country, however, has proved unable or unwilling to assimilate this lesson, perhaps because racial animosity is too deeply embedded in our social system. We seem to have learned mostly that it's really bad to do bad things to certain groups of people, but that it's totally OK to do them to others. We're a country with a Holocaust museum, partly government sponsored, and we're sitting still while calls to label members of another religion (not Jews, so it's OK???) echo through the public sphere. Are we really so much better, so different from, the Germans who sat still and were silent while their own culture's scapegoats were labelled? I say this not to excuse them,but to condemn us. If anything, the Germans had the excuse that they, like the rest of the world, had never seen anything like what the Holocaust became--they had no example other than their private, moral beliefs about what was acceptable to do. We have that museum. We have thousands of movies and millions of books and millions of pages of curriculum about bystanders and upstanders. We have survivors still walking around among us telling their stories. We know where this kind of scapegoating can lead--so what the hell is our excuse, we exemplary Americans?
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