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Kristallnacht in America? Unthinkable!
Think again.
Kristallnacht, a word even those of us who know no German recognize immediately as a harbinger of real, barbaric terror. The very sound of it is to so many whose forbears suffered horribly through those days, and also to those of us who only know of its murderous rampages by study and reading, terrifying.
Many of us, now removed both by 84 years of time and a rapidly fading memory of that epochal event, recall it by envisioning pictures of broken shop windows and Synagogues in flames. But, sadly, we have very little understanding of why it was such a world-changing couple of days in early November of 1938 and how it set in motion the greatest crime against humanity in the history of the world.
This essay will briefly examine that history and, against that background, ask these questions: (1) can it happen here, or, perhaps more accurately, (2) has it, or some iteration of it, already happened here?
Prompted to discuss this nightmare in history by a passage in remarkable novel we just read, Hour of the Cat, a work referred to by some reviewers as a work of “History Mystery” as it draws on actual events and features real figures from history in WWII as protagonists, such as Gen. William “Wild Bill” Donavan and Admiral Canaris, I decided it would be a good project to learn more about Kristallnacht in view of the eerie parallels between what I read there and events happening right here in America in recent times, beginning with the riots precipitated by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020. As I read this passage, I was struck by powerful emotions- first, and obviously, pure revulsion that this kind of sick cruelty could be unleashed on one’s own fellow countrymen; second, questioning how this is any way different from what has been done to American citizens in cities across our own Nation; third, a renewed sense of bafflement and perplexity at how many of our “leaders” have either remained silent about this savagery or, as in the case of the Vice President and the Speaker of the House, actively encouraged it. Finally, I found myself wondering why there haven’t been any number of “thought pieces” raising what I hope to examine here: why are these two events, both repugnant to every tenet of Western Civilization, not being considered in tandem so as to illustrate the truly dangerous point we have reached in the America of Biden and the far-far-left ideologues he genuflects before?
Before considering the history of the events of 1938, here is a brief extract from the passage which got me to thinking about these matters:
BERLIN, Nov. 10- The havoc wreaked upon Germany’s Jewish population over the last two days represented a major escalation in the Nazi regime’s anti-Semitic campaign. Estimates of the number of Jews arrested are as high as 30,000. Most were immediately shipped to concentration camps. Though there are as yet no official figures, it’s thought at least 100 Jews lost their lives and thousands more were injured. While the police stood by, Germany’s towns and cities reverberated with the sounds of shattering glass as Jewish businesses were looted and vandalized, and homes and apartments raided and pillaged. In Berlin and Munich, the major synagogues were put to the torch. A similar fate befell other Jewish houses of worship throughout the country. (p. 373)
Kristallnacht: November 9 and 10, 1938, Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland.
Of the many sources of solid information describing Kristallnacht, its origins, and its aftermath, the most comprehensive I found was from, not surprisingly, the United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial, and the document to which I refer below can be found here. For anyone seeking to expand their knowledge of this bleak history and its relevance to our current precarious situation in America, I cannot recommend it too highly.
Kristallnacht, literally, “Night of Crystal,” is often referred to as the “Night of Broken Glass.” The name refers to the wave of violent anti-Jewish pogroms which took place on November 9 and 10, 1938. This wave of violence took place throughout Germany, annexed Austria, and in areas of the Sudetenland View This Term in the Glossary in Czechoslovakia recently occupied by German troops.
Kristallnacht owes its name to the shards of shattered glass that lined German streets in the wake of the pogrom—broken glass from the windows of synagogues, homes, and Jewish-owned businesses plundered and destroyed during the violence.
***
The violence was instigated primarily by Nazi Party officials and members of the SA (Sturmabteilung: commonly known as Storm Troopers) and Hitler Youth.
In its aftermath, German officials announced that Kristallnacht had erupted as a spontaneous outburst of public sentiment in response to the assassination of Ernst vom Rath. Vom Rath was a German embassy official stationed in Paris. Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew, had shot the diplomat on November 7, 1938. A few days earlier, German authorities had expelled thousands of Jews of Polish citizenship living in Germany from the Reich; Grynszpan had received news that his parents, residents in Germany since 1911, were among them.
Grynszpan’s parents and the other expelled Polish Jews were initially denied entry into their native Poland. They found themselves stranded in a refugee camp near the town of Zbaszyn in the border region between Poland and Germany. Already living illegally in Paris himself, a desperate Grynszpan apparently sought revenge for his family’s precarious circumstances by appearing at the German embassy and shooting the diplomatic official assigned to assist him.
Vom Rath died on November 9, 1938, two days after the shooting. The day happened to coincide with the anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, an important date in the National Socialist calendar. The Nazi Party leadership, assembled in Munich for the commemoration, chose to use the occasion as a pretext to launch a night of antisemitic excesses. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, a chief instigator of the Kristallnacht pogroms, suggested to the convened Nazi ‘Old Guard’ that ‘World Jewry’ had conspired to commit the assassination. He announced that “the Führer has decided that … demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by the Party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be hampered.”
***
Goebbels’ words appear to have been taken as a command for unleashing the violence. After his speech, the assembled regional Party leaders issued instructions to their local offices. Violence began to erupt in various parts of the Reich throughout the late evening and early morning hours of November 9–10. At 1:20 a.m. on November 10, Reinhard Heydrich, in his capacity as head of the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei) sent an urgent telegram to headquarters and stations of the State Police and to SA leaders in their various districts, which contained directives regarding the riots. SA and Hitler Youth units throughout Germany and its annexed territories engaged in the destruction of Jewish-owned homes and businesses. Members of many units wore civilian clothes to support the fiction that the disturbances were expressions of ‘outraged public reaction.’
As indescribably horrible as these two days were, the murders, looting, pillaging, seizure of property, etc., paled in comparison to what Kristallnacht set in motion- The Final Solution:
The events of Kristallnacht represented one of the most important turning points in National Socialist antisemitic policy. Historians have noted that after the pogrom, … anti-Jewish policy was concentrated more and more concretely into the hands of the SS. Moreover, the passivity with which most German civilians responded to the violence signaled to the Nazi regime that the German public was prepared for more radical measures.
The Nazi regime expanded and radicalized measures aimed at removing Jews entirely from German economic and social life in the forthcoming years. The regime moved eventually toward policies of forced emigration, and finally toward the realization of a Germany “free of Jews” (judenrein) by deportation of the Jewish population “to the East.”
Thus, Kristallnacht figures as an essential turning point in Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews, which culminated in the attempt to annihilate the European Jews.
A few scenes are presented here only for the purpose of reminding ourselves, as in “Never Again,” of the similarity of these scenes from 1938 to the ones 82 to 84 years later:
Kristallnacht-2020, 2021 (and beyond?): Portland, Seattle, Chicago, New York City, Minneapolis, Kenosha, Los Angeles
Prefatory to this discussion, I hasten to note there are significant distinctions between 1938 and our present time, just as there are parallels which may or may not portend great danger looming over the charred, smoking ruins of parts of many of our cities—along with broken glass. The parallels, however, are frightening.
As was clear from the above materials, the German hierarchy turned the killing of a very minor embassy official in Paris – ironically, an anti-Nazi!- into “a conspiracy of the ‘International Jews’” to be met with “spontaneous” “protests.” One cannot read that and not be reminded of Rahm Emanuel’s famous exhortation in the Obama years: “Never let a crisis go to waste!”
We also learn that firemen and police officers stood by and watched the conflagration, doing nothing. Substitute the city names in the sub-title above with Berlin, Vienna, Munich, etc., and those accounts take on a decidedly more modern meaning, as recently as similar events in the past few weeks in San Francisco, Walnut Creek, and the Magnificent Mile of Chicago.
The looters and vandals rushed through the city’s Magnificent Mile and other parts of downtown, where they were seen carrying bags full of stolen goods, the Tribune reported.
The parallels continue with lectures from “dignitaries” such as Pelosi and Harris and other luminaries about, in the case of the former, how she is surprised that “there weren’t more” acts of wanton destruction and, in the case of the latter, advocating for a fund to put up bail for thugs whose “spontaneous” “protests” included repeated efforts to burn down the Federal Courthouse in Portland, Oregon.
Several articles published in the immediate aftermath of the George Floyd incident sound similar themes. One of the most striking was by Rabbi Yakov Saacks entitled The Kristallnacht You Didn’t Hear About in which he recounts events in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles:
In addition to destruction and graffiti inflicted upon the synagogues, a number of kosher restaurants, bakeries and stores were ransacked by protesters, looting much of the merchandise and causing extensive property damage. Some of the stores impacted include Ariel Glatt Kosher Market, Mensch Bakery and Kitchen, and Syd’s Pharmacy and Kosher Vitamins, all located in this small area.
Some of the synagogues damaged as a result of vandalism, graffiti and looting by protesters include Congregation Kehilas Yaakov, Tiferes Tzvi and Congregation Beth Israel, one of the oldest synagogues in Los Angeles and the spiritual home to many Holocaust survivors over the years. At the latest count, at least five synagogues in the area were vandalized, as were three Jewish schools.
So, after the end of Shavuos, the holiday in which Jewish people joyfully commemorate the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, the Jewish community of Los Angeles concluded it with a new ritual of going to clean off the hateful graffiti from their houses of worship, while picking up the broken glass. One small business owner described a “late Saturday night with people driving down the Fairfax district streets screaming, ‘effing Jews.’”
Kristallnacht?
I am not trying to be cute by calling this Kristallnacht, which means night of broken glass, I mean it literally.
In the interest of keeping my account balanced, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that some of the comments to this article pointed out that these types of incidents took place all over the city, not only in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Fairfax. However, to me, the screams “ effing Jews” is more than a little persuasive toward the veracity of his account. Here is a scene from that rampage- look familiar?
Another author likened our modern-day Kristallnacht to Lord of the Flies and its line “The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.” Under the title The Week America Lost Its Way he considered the phenomenon we are addressing here:
That’s what happened in America last week when mob violence replaced police as the standard of authority. When you saw white people taking a knee to prostrate themselves before looters and to renounce their “white privilege,” you also saw parallels to Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Hitler’s Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.
***
Kristallnacht is the name given to a pogrom carried out against Jewish shops, homes, cemeteries and synagogues in November 1938 by Nazi paramilitaries known as Brownshirts. They were an exact parallel of the black-garbed stormtroopers that ravaged neighborhoods in dozens of U.S. cities the last 10 days or so. Don’t let the name Antifa fool you. These “anti-fascists” have adopted the tactics of the fascists as their own (and even the uniform of the Italian Blackshirts). Just as Kristallnacht was intended to send a message to Jews, so too were the riots last week intended to send a signal to law-abiding whites. The words that journalist Hugh Greene wrote about Kristallnacht in 1938 could just as easily have been written today about the riots that followed the murder of George Floyd:
“Mob law ruled … throughout this afternoon and evening, and hordes of hooligans indulged in an orgy of destruction. … Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people.”
You could make the case that the riots last week represented only a fraction of Americans, whether black or white, and that we should not ascribe too much importance to them. But that was true also in Nazi Germany and Mao’s China. The actual revolutionaries and radicals carrying out the acts of domestic terrorism are always few, but if they are not condemned forcefully and convincingly, then they are emboldened to strike again and again. So-called “good” Germans celebrated the lawless attacks on Jewish citizens in 1938, giving tacit permission for the death camps that would kill millions. Many in the power structure of the United States are likewise giving a green light to current and future violence by sanctioning riots as “protests” and by excusing looting and murder as a reasonable response to Floyd’s death.
Perhaps the most haunting article I found about these parallels was by an author who describes himself as a patriotic American and an American Jew and who notes that writing about this subject was a very sad undertaking. Under the title Is America Starting Down the Path of Nazi Germany?, he makes these highly relevant observations about the dangers inherent in our current dilemma:
The name Kristallnacht refers to the litter of broken glass … exactly the same as what we saw take place in major American cities over the past few weeks. How did they compare? See the blocks of boarded-up businesses all over Manhattan. See 700 buildings damaged, burned and destroyed in Minneapolis. See downtown Seattle run by a “warlord” and armed domestic terrorists with AR-15s.
In Paris this week, protesters chanted, “Dirty Jews!” The Marxist mayor of New York City has joined tens of thousands at a “Black Trans Lives Matter” event in Brooklyn while ordering parks and playgrounds for Orthodox Jewish children welded shut.
Today’s version of book burning is HBO Max banning “Gone With the Wind,” a photo of Winston Churchill “disappearing” from Google, Hollywood canceling “Cops” and “Live PD.”
Yes, all that happened in just the last few weeks. You may not have heard about it because it was scarcely reported by the mainstream propaganda media.
Never forget the famous Holocaust lesson: After they have come for me, they will come for you, and there will be no one left to stop them.
Trust me, they’re coming for all of us.
They won’t stop. This will only get worse and out of control, unless we draw a line in the sand, stand up to the bullies, fight them tooth and nail, and stop them now.
Strong language? A bit over the top, you say? Watch some of the oral history videos provided by the United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial of the survivors of Kristallnacht and ask yourself whether they might have just a slightly different take on what could well happen to us if our “leaders” do not start taking seriously their Oath- a solemn, sworn commitment which was once universally seen as the sacred matter of honor it should still represent now – to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States—and us.
Where to from here? January 6, The Anointed Elite and OUR Priorities Instead of Theirs.
An article appeared a few days ago in Newsweek.com, amazingly enough presenting a realistic view of the cockamamie and skewed priorities of our “Ruling Elite” when it comes to reversing the scary trends discussed here. It is entitled Liberal Elites Want Us to Care About Jan. 6. But They Don’t Care When Our Cities Burn and, as the author – our colleague, @JennaStocker, to whom I express my sincere appreciation for such a fine piece of writing – is a resident of Minneapolis, the birthplace of the George Floyd mayhem, is quite graphic concerning the impact of that wanton destruction:
I remember the call from my husband on May 31. It was our anniversary, and he was out running errands before he came home—not because we had plans, but because there was a curfew in place in Minneapolis. He called to tell me he had to drive to a nearby suburb to pick up a medical prescription. “Our Walgreens on Hennepin Avenue isn’t there anymore,” he said. “It was burned to the ground.”
Over the spring and summer of 2020, thousands of businesses were looted, damaged, or totally destroyed during the George Floyd protests—especially here, where Floyd was killed. Every day we read heartbreaking stories of business owners begging and pleading with rioters to spare their livelihoods, many of them uninsured, pleas that went unheeded. There was over $2 billion in property damage.
She then illustrates just how far off the rails our “leaders” have gone in commemorating Jan. 6 as the worst day in the history of the known universe, or, as the Vice President of the United States stated at the recent grotesque anniversary Group Hug, worse than Pearl Harbor or September 11:
And yet, to follow the mainstream news, you’d be forgiven for thinking the destruction of cities across the country—the decimation of small businesses, many of them owned by lower income people of color—wasn’t the biggest story of violence in recent history. That honor, to hear the media tell it, is reserved for an hours-long mobbing of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. The Capitol riot on January 6, 2021 has been the lead story in the liberal mainstream media all week long.
One line in that column jumped off the page as it so perfectly described the scene repeated over and over again in November 1938 across Germany: “business owners begging and pleading with rioters to spare their livelihoods.” An image I cannot clear from my mind since I saw the video recently as it replicated almost exactly the scenes from the old movies from 1938: the scene of a pack of young thugs (exactly like the Brown Shirts of 1938) pulling a bus driver from his vehicle and forcing him to kneel while they almost beat him to death.
Another passage highlighted what many of us believe—I am definitely in that number— that there will be no return to anything resembling “normalcy” until the media returns to its traditional role of “watchdog”:
But the narrative from most of the journalists who flew in from New York was of a city and by extension a country facing the racial reckoning it deserved. There were no rioters, to hear the media tell it; the mobs throwing Molotov cocktails shattering windows were demonstrators and “mostly peaceful” protesters. The violence was framed as a necessary airing of grievances. The collateral damage to businesses and lives were cast as a pittance compared to the national discussion on race relations and policing in America.
Here I should note my full agreement with Dr. Scott Atlas’ description of the media in his recent book A Plague Upon Our House: “[They were] the most despicable group of unprincipled liars one could ever imagine.”
While I urge a full reading of this most important article as it reveals, at times in painful detail, the very similarities I have been talking about. She concludes:
The real threat to democracy is an elite class who has shown us they value their pain, their inconvenience, and their lives more than ours. How can they ask us to care about one riotous day last January when every day in cities across America, the lives of the most vulnerable are in danger, their livelihoods threatened?
A powerful overclass apathetic to the concerns of the people they are supposed to represent, and for whom they work, is the real miscarriage of justice they claim as their own.
These trends show no signs of abating any time soon and certainly will not be constrained as long as there is a corrupt, doddering, dementia-stricken old fool in the Oval Office along with the most incompetent, cackling idiot ever to occupy the office of Vice-President. There will be no change until there is a basic cultural shift back to the traditions and values upon which our Nation — the greatest ever devised by the mind of Man— was founded.
These are my views. I welcome yours. For instance,
- Is it an exaggeration to see such clear parallels between 1938 Germany and our present situation?
- Is it overstating the matter to see our present condition as downright dangerous?
- Are the distinctions between the Nazi Germany of 1938 and America of 2022 so stark as to render it impossible for another Kristallnacht to occur?
- What, in your opinion, are the most durable and strongest such distinctions?
- Do you believe, as I do, that having Biden in the Oval Office represents a clear and present danger to the Republic?
As one deeply troubled by what I see in our present predicament, as informed by the clear and alarming lessons of 1938, I would welcome any thoughts you may wish to offer.
And, in closing, most important of all:
God Bless America!
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I think you are spot on. You articulated a lot of arguments I’ve been making, better than I have. Or could.
At this point you cannot draw parallels unless you are fully prepared to show an organizational link between the government and the actions of rioters in the street. By 1938 the Nazi Party had been in full control of the German state for five years. There may be a quiet approval by the political left but you would have to show me evidence of actual planning and involvement.
Thank you. If you read the post, I assume you noted I was careful to note there are distinctions between the two periods. Your observations are appreciated, Jim
Thank you very much! Much appreciated. Jim
Does the lack of prosecution of any of the perpetrators not constitute the government’s involvement in the matter?
It’s like saying in Jim Crow days that the police didn’t participate in the lynching, they just there there holding a torch watching it.
How about Kamala promoting bail for antifa rioters? How about FBI agents provocateurs on Jan 6? Do you need more?
The left and the Democrats and Big Tech are on the side of suppression of speech.
Hard to argue against any of this . . .
The link to the government may not be direct, but the racialization of all aspects of life and society, perpetrated by the Democrat Party and their extensions in academia and media, will lead to more and more of this sort of thing.
Stirring up resentment between groups is very dangerous. As Ralph Peters wrote many years ago:
Man loves, men hate. While individual men and women can sustain feelings of love over a lifetime toward a parent or through decades toward a spouse, no significant group in human history has sustained an emotion that could honestly be characterized as love. Groups hate. And they hate well…Love is an introspective emotion, while hate is easily extroverted…We refuse to believe that the “civilized peoples of the Balkans could slaughter each other over an event that occurred over six hundred years ago. But they do. Hatred does not need a reason, only an excuse.
Excuses for inter-group resentment are now being manufactured at high speed…even mass produced. The only way to stop this is to greatly reduce the power and influence of the Democrats and their allied forces. If we fail to do this, we are likely in for very dark times indeed.
An apt comparison.
Antifa (and other affiliated ‘black bloc’ groups like the RCP) is the modern SA. They are the angry fist of the Democrat Party. No streets but their streets.
But while they may be anti-Semitic, that is incidental. The real targets of the current iteration of events are not Jews but rather the mythical “White Christian Nationalist.” This is the archetype under which Trump supporters are now being lumped. These are the new, re-branded “bitter clingers” and “Deplorables.”
Important to note that there was considerably political violence in Germany prior to the formal Nazi takeover of the machinery of government. Both the Left and the Right were guilty of this.
In the US, political intimidation and violence have been rising for a couple of decades, especially on the Left and especially in the universities. See my 2016 post The United States of Weimar? for some examples.
Thanks for these excellent points; of course, I specifically noted Kahhh … Mahlaaa in the post, as her action in openly advocating for – fund raising for, basically- the street thugs who were setting fire to everything they could reach was simply incomprehensible unless one has to think that she does actually want to destroy America. I still find that difficult to believe- that an American citizen, especially one to whom this Nation has been so generous, would want to destroy her own country. But they are definitely out there.
Incidentally, our Symphony Orchestra is having Beethoven and Blue Jeans Saturday night, with the First Symphony being the opener! If you’re in the Florida Panhandle, let me know and we’ll get you all tickets! Sincerely, Jim
Thanks.
I do think it’s possible. But I don’t think Jews will be the targets.
A parallel of creeping authoritarianism: Here in WA state, there is a change proposed to the public health agency’s quarantine authority re communicable diseases, to empower the director on his own discretion to use law enforcement to take into custody and render into quarantine (they have already bought one hotel on the I-5 corridor for this purpose and have advertised for attendants to work there) those persons and families who refuse to comply with mandatory vaccination or other measures.
A stark difference from 1938 Germany: several million privately owned firearms in lawful possession by the citizenry.
These are my views. I welcome yours. For instance,
Gary E. Robbins
I would say it is creeping pretty fast! This is so frightening I don’t have words to express it, but maybe the following photo will help explain the first thought when I read of this dictatorial rule
“Work makes one free”, indeed. Every day we thank God for many things, one of which always at the top of the list-that we live in the Free State of Florida with a Governor who has solid instincts toward freedom and liberty, no matter the cost or obstacle! Thanks for this comment, Jim
@ejhill, I don’t think it’s going to look quite like that, but the outcome will be the same. I think it was Mises who labeled communism as “Russian – style Marxism,” and fascism as “European – Style Marxism.” I think what we’re seeing take form, or we have seen take form already, is an American – style Marxism, an only slightly modified form of fascism. In the American form, the means of production, including the modes of communication, remain in private hands, but in our case, the government doesn’t have to tell the producers what to produce. They already know, and are in such close agreement with the government, that the government doesn’t have to get its hands dirty. Nobody had to tell Lois Lerner what to do with the IRS. All the Obama administration needed to do was to put the person in the position who already knew what to do.
Did Obama know what Lerner was doing? Of course he did. Did he direct her to do it? No need. Therefore, there exists no discernable organizational effort to make it happen. There you have it. Plausible deniability.
The present-day Left is generally hostile to Israel and supportive of the Palestinians, who they have decided are an oppressed people. And this hostility often spills over into outright anti-Semitism.
See this story about Christian leaders in the Middle East, who seem more concerned about supposed ‘persecution’ of Christians in Israel than about very real and definite persecution of Christians in many Muslim-controlled countries:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/church_leaders_misplace_the_blame_for_christian_persecution_in_the_middle_east.html?
One of the scarier books I have ever read about the way The Third Reich handled the buildup into its uber control over the citizenry was Karl Mayer’s book: “They Thought They Were Free.”
For instance, Mayer’s book examines how there were two sides to the destruction of the Jewish people under Hitler.
One was the dark side of humanity that every American since 1945 has had shoved in their faces, that of the Brown Shirts who would see to it that a Jewish man walking with his gentile girlfriend was beaten up by a local mob.
But the other side was that of other German citizens, who still remembered that before Hitler had arrived, they had been friendly with their Jewish neighbors, that they had in fact witnessed a great deal of inter marriage between Christians and Jews.
So when Kristlenacht occurred, some 5 and a half years after Hitler had been given power, many Germans were told – and believed – that the new policy of sending Jewish males from age 14 up to places where they could live their lives in safety, away from those mobs, would be a helpful policy. Clearly the male Jews needed to be safe.
So German police officers kindly escorted their own neighbors off to the street, where they would be marched off to railway stations and then transported to places of safety. Often the German police officers would even help their neighbors pack for the trip.
This is a theme that even Eli Wiesel touches on in his masterpiece “Night” — that when the initial wave of German soldiers came through his East European village, they were seen as liberating the village from the draconian rule of Stalin. In fact in many ways, the first several weeks after the soldiers arrival were pleasant ones. The soldiers even helped when a fence broke and cows got out. Both Jews and gentiles had long desired Stalin’s removal from their lives.
When Wiesel’s cousin arrived from another village and tried to tell everyone to be prepared, that these friendly soldiers would be given orders to leave and that the SS death squads would take their places, no one listened. His stories of how all the other Jews in his village were then marched into the hillsides to be shot and killed were seen as the tales of a mentally unstable human being.
End of Part One
Part Two
In some ways, it is more comforting for me to see a past holocaust as having occurred because an entire nation was made up of hate-filled rabid creatures than to contemplate any actual accounts of how as long as a holocaust is planned so carefully that Evil occurs under the guise of goodness, even good people will help the holocaust occur. It is more comforting to me that Evil occurs because a certain race, the German people, were rabid non-human monsters than to consider that Evil occurs when the policies are sold as being helpful ones offering a certain group of people a better life. Because after all, aren’t most of the people I have known throughout my life been normal, other-concerned humans?
That is why Mayer’s book and Wiesel’s book both filled my heart with terror. And given what I am knowing is happening now, I am terrified not only for those however many millions have died in the past but for the hundreds of thousands who have died since Mar 13th 2020 and the millions of us that will be crushed like the un-vaccinated vermin we will be viewed as being in the near future.
As well as the millions upon millions of people whose innate immunity will be shredded within two years of the endless parade of vaxxes and boosters.
Not the only targets, for sure.
Back when the riots were turning into widespread burning and looting, with no interference from the police, I may have used the term Kristallnacht, and may have used it right here on Ricochet. I certainly was thinking it. Whether or not I used that term, I used the term “pogroms” more often.
Of course the analogies are not perfect. Analogies never are. If they were identical in all respects they wouldn’t be analogies.
I think you can draw that link, though the DNC. Not in a neat organizational flow chart – but by personnel. The same people are out fundraising for BLM and Democrat candidates. Most famously Kamala Harris who solicited donations for a bail fund to get BLM rioters out of jail. Then prosecutors conveniently dropped any requirement for bail.
Just as the Nazis organized and financed the brown shirts, I think the DNC financed and organized BLM.
A pogrom targetting which group? A pogrom needs a target to be a pogrom.
All rioting or civil unrest isn’t the same as a pogrom or Kristallnacht. Still can be appalling, but not necessarily the same thing.
Anything they deemed fascist.
I seem to hear an echo.
Examples?
Does it feel like they’re targeting you?
Who is you?
“Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”
If history does indeed repeat itself, seems we’re back in 1170 when Henry II said those words about Thomas Becket. Sure enough, next day he, Thomas Becket, was dead. Thank you for making this excellent point, Jim
With many RINO’s right there with them in being supportive.
Anyone willing to do the #xxxlivesmatter hashtag except where xxx=black.
If I had a business in an urban area, I would probably feel targeted. But I’m out of sight, out of mind, so they will only come for me after they’re done with the Jews, business owners, police, etc.