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Kristallnakt finds Kansas (and most everywhere in-between) |
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Published March 1st, 2019
Duluth News Tribune, Duluth, MN
By John Freivalds
For you Kristallnakt challenged, Hitler's Nazi brown shirts with government support smashed Jewish owned shops and burned 270 synagogues on November 9th 1938, some 80 years ago. Sadly, once again history repeats itself. Will anyone remember the turmoil's we are going through and its causes 80 years ago. Probably not. Yet Kristallnakt and the Border wall have served the same purpose; create fear and intolerance. It is really time to soft pedal Trump and his most ardent supporters as a mere disrupter of the status quo and admit they are really no different from Hitler and autocrats from the past.
Hitler rose to power in Germany in 1933 when the county was in turmoil. And Hitler like any Autocrat had to find some time to blame, someone to hate. He found the Jews which only represented some 1% of the population. To keep his popularity up he would rant against the Jews day and night much like Trump has been ranting (tweeting) against undocumented aliens coming from Mexico.
Finally, one young Jew tired of all the Jewish bashing killed a Nazi and this led Hitler's' brown shorts to attack every Jewish business on November 9,1938. That night of terror led to more terror acts and eventually to concentration camps and the holocaust. No institution was strong enough in Germany to resist it. And the general populace was indifferent to the plight of the Jews. Many in the US are indifferent to the plight of refugees and now it is common to here of propel being insulted for merely speaking Spanish in public! The debate over the wall has created fear and distrust and hate against immigrants and refugees. As Frank Foer of the Atlantic points doting nothing against this make you complicit.
We are fortunate that we have intuitions: the constitution, the media, the courts and other politic parties to protect us from the worst of autocrats. The Presidents heroes who have no such constraints are Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and Vladimir Putin of Russia. Both have allegedly killed journalists and politicians they dislike and censored the media in their countries. The Mueller investigation will reveal the ties between them and the Trump administration and I believe it has something to do with money.
The bad news now is not the wall itself but what demonization is directed against Mexicans and Central Americans to justify the detentions, family separations, and the wall. Muslims did not provoke the same hatred. There were not phone prompts that said "Press one of English and 2 for Arabic." Illegal aliens Spanish speaking counters They are now nothing more than drug traffickers, murderers, rapists, gang members all of which are worthy to be detained except those working at Trump properties. But arch conservative pundit Ann Coulter disagrees ad says that the real security threat is "the idiot we have for President. She goes on to say that the wall means something to the "dumbest of the dumb. “Their uniform is not brown shirts like Hitler's' storm trooper but the red hates. Those we once a campaign gives away but to many are now symbols if intolerance just likes the white sheets of the KKK.
The good news is that throughout history all autocrats fail as they surround themselves with sycophants ho are afraid to question their boss who is wrapped in his hubris.. Many reasonable people have left the Trump administration because they were against many of his excesses. Thus, the real question is not can something like a Kristallnakt happen here, but rather we are watching it happen now.