Fresh Air's episode for the occasion features two good older interviews: a 2005 one with Laurence Rees on his book, Auschwitz: A New History, and an 1988 interview with Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, who died in 2016. The PBS NewsHour segment, "The lessons of Auschwitz, 75 years after its liberation," features some survivors revisiting the camp and some striking memories. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website has an excellent primer on Auschwitz and other resources. (Going through the museum's permanent exhibit is a powerful experience.)
Although a solely historical post might be appropriate today, it feels more pressing to note current events. Hate crimes are on the rise in some areas, and the number of high-profile hate crimes in recent years is troubling. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) tracks anti-Semitic incidents. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a more general "hatewatch" page, and both organizations maintain "hate maps." FBI statistics for 2019 hate crimes aren't available yet, but the website has information from1995 through 2018, and as CNN summarizes, the 2018 report "collected data from 110 fewer agencies" but "found that 7,120 hate crime incidents were reported by law enforcement agencies to the FBI in 2018, just 55 fewer than had been reported in 2017. Between 2016 and 2017, the FBI found a 17% increase in reported incidents." Besides raw numbers, though, it's the overall efforts to intimidate marginalized groups that's disturbing.
A New York Times article from earlier this month reports that:
The number of anti-Semitic hate crimes recorded by authorities in Los Angeles has now doubled, thanks in part to those changes. But the rising numbers also mirror a trend seen in cities across the United States. A coming report from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, shows that anti-Semitic hate crimes in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — the nation’s three largest cities — are poised to hit an 18-year peak.
"It is something not seen in many years," said Brian Levin, the report’s lead author, referring to the fact that Jews in those three cities are now targeted as frequently as gay men and African-Americans in hate crimes. The report, which uses the most recent official police data, found that Jews in all three cities are being targeted at the highest numbers seen since 2001. . . .
"A substantial proportion of these hate crimes involve brutal physical attacks on Orthodox Jews who are easily identifiable,” Mr. Levin said. “Today anti-Semitism and ignorance about the Holocaust has simply become broadly acceptable, and that is reflected in the increasing number of assaults and a diversity of offenders, who now also tend to be older." . . .
[During Hanukkah], a man was charged with a hate crime in the stabbing of five Jews in Monsey, N.Y., at the home of a rabbi, and a gun battle at a kosher market in Jersey City, N.J., left three people inside the store and a police officer dead.
Added to that picture of bigotry, the Trump administration tried several times to institute a "Muslim ban," a measure with dangerous historical precedents, and finally succeeded in June 2018. The ACLU, which has a good collection of personal stories of living with the Muslim ban, reports that the Trump administration is seeking to expand the Muslim ban, but also that Speaker of House Nancy Pelosi is introducing a "NO BAN Act" to reverse the Trump measures. (Not that the current, Republican-controlled Senate will approve the bill.) It's also worth revisiting Josh Marshall's July 2016 piece, "A Propagator of Race Hatred and Violence," about Trump falsely, grotesquely claiming that American Muslims cheered the 9/11 attacks and the World Trade Center falling. As Marshall notes, "authoritarian figures require violence and disorder," and Trump has made other statements that are "the kind of wild racist incitement that puts whole societies in danger."
Meanwhile, at the Southern border, asylum seekers are held in appalling conditions. The America Academy of Pediatrics has repeatedly called for ending the family separation policy and for providing better care for the imprisoned children, and every firsthand report has been chilling. The conditions have been compared to theinfamous Andersonville prison camp during the Civil War and to concentration camps, by numerous people qualified to judge, including Holocaust survivors. The term itself is less important than the general dynamics; as one expert has explained:
"What's required is a little bit of demystification of it," says Waitman Wade Beorn, a Holocaust and genocide studies historian and a lecturer at the University of Virginia. "Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz. Concentration camps in general have always been designed—at the most basic level—to separate one group of people from another group. Usually, because the majority group, or the creators of the camp, deem the people they're putting in it to be dangerous or undesirable in some way."
The awful conditions in the camps are not accidental. Trump has a long history of racism and started his campaign with a racist tirade against Mexicans. At least one of his staffers, Senior Policy Advisor Stephen Miller, is an extreme bigot and a driving force on Trump's immigration policies. As Adam Serwer has observed of the Trump administration as a whole, the cruelty is the point.
Finally, who can forget the "Unite the Right" rally of neo-Nazis and other white supremacists in Charlottesville, VA in August 2017, an alarming demonstration that lead to the murder of counterprotester Heather Heyer? Trump initially condemned the rally, but he just couldn't stick to that script, and a mere one day later, went on to claim that "there's blame on both sides" and "very fine people on both sides." Later indignant claims by Trump and his supporters that he wasn't calling neo-Nazis and other white supremacists "very fine people" were far from convincing.
Trump, his administration and his supporters are far from the only problem. The United States has never been free of bigotry – slavery, as well as the killing and displacement of Native Americans, are central to our history. Institutionalized, systemic bigotry persists even without conscious, active support. But it does feel as if some of the progress of the past several decades has been rolled back, or at least that what had been underground is now increasingly out in the open. Barack Obama and his family were subjected to an alarming amount of despicable, racist attacks. And whatever Trump and his team think of themselves, black Americans overwhelmingly view Trump as racist and white supremacists think Trump is one of their own.
Most acts of evil don't rise to the level of genocide. But genocide always has precursors, none of which are ever positive and none of which should ever go unchallenged. Some Holocaust comparisons are appropriate. Most importantly, there's never a bad time to oppose bigotry and cruelty.
Update:: The New York Times reports that the Trump administration has issued press credentials to:
TruNews, a website aimed at conservative Christians whose founder, a pastor named Rick Wiles, recently described Trump’s impeachment as "a Jew coup" planned by "a Jewish cabal." . . .
TruNews, which Wiles founded as an online radio program in 1999 called America’s Hope, has a history of spreading conspiracy theories and proclaiming an imminent apocalypse. It drew more scrutiny in November after Wiles, in an online video, accused Jews of orchestrating Trump’s impeachment.
"That’s the way Jews work," Wiles said. "They are deceivers. They plot, they lie, they do whatever they have to do to accomplish their political agenda. This ‘Impeach Trump’ movement is a Jew coup, and the American people better wake up to it really fast."
Wiles also warned his listeners that "when Jews take over a country, they kill millions of Christians."
Afterward, Rep. Ted Deutch of Florida and Elaine Luria of Virginia wrote to the White House asking why TruNews had been allowed to attend presidential events. They did not receive a response.
In contrast, the Trump administration has banned CNN in the past and Trump's state department has recently banned NPR, most likely in an act of petulant retaliation. Apparently, the Trump administration views those organizations as a threat, but nominally Christian, far-right, anti-Semitic groups are welcome.
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