After reading Crashing Vor’s diary today, I recalled a documentary I saw many years ago that featured Holocaust survivors talking about the horrors suffered at the hands of Hitler and his Nazis.
But one man stood out to me. He talked about Hitler’s rise. How Hitler, in his speeches, blatantly blaming Jews for all of Germany’s problems, had been underestimated and written off by too many. This survivor knew in his gut what was coming and made plans to leave Germany before the election that put Hitler in absolute power.
He begged his family and friends to leave with him but they didn’t listen. They told him, “Don’t worry. No one will vote for the fool Hitler.” We all know what happened next.
Now, there were a number of comments in Crashing Vor’s piece that sounded very similar: The “fool” Trump could never win.
I want to believe that. I want to believe my fellow Americans are better than Trump.
However, I also live in Florida where my vote for Gore was stolen by the Republicans in 2000. Add in GOP gerrymandering and voter suppression and the “fool” Trump may bamboozle a win like GWBush did. And we all know what happened next.
If we can’t bring ourselves to admit the comparison, let’s take a moment to listen to Holocaust Survivors who see Trump from another perspective.
From a January article in the Washington Post, titled: In The Age Of Trump, Grim Warnings From Holocaust Survivors. www.washingtonpost.com/...
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is always a somber time for Auschwitz survivor Irene Weiss. But this year’s observance had an additional layer of grief: For the first time, Weiss is worried about her adopted homeland.
“I am exceptionally concerned about demagogues,” the 85-year-old Weiss told me at Wednesday’s commemoration at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “They touch me in a place that I remember. I know their influence and, unfortunately, I know how receptive audiences are to demagogues and what it leads to.”
… “It has echoes, and maybe more so to me than to native-born Americans,” she said after lighting a candle for Hitler’s victims. “I’m scared. I don’t like the trend. I don’t like how many people are applauding when they hear these demagogues. It can turn.”
…“It’s really frightening,” said Al Munzer, hidden as an infant in the Netherlands with a Dutch family and their Muslim nanny. “When you see these mass rallies that Trump is able to attract, you really wonder: How are they buying into this message of hate?”
Munzer, who lost two sisters and his father to the Nazis, said he never thought such things could happen in America, but now he’s not so sure. “Thinking that Germany was somehow unique is wrong,” he said.
… At this time of open hostility to Muslims in America, museum staff arranged for Johanna Gerechter Neumann, who fled with her family to Albania after Kristallnacht, to talk about how Muslims protected them from Hitler. Her father, a patriotic German and World War I veteran, “certainly thought that it could never happen in Germany,” she said. “It did happen. Slowly, but it did happen.”
“It’s not Weimar,” she said, “but it could become Weimar Germany if you have Mr. Trump here and people keep believing what he says. . . . I think one has to speak up. And that’s the one lesson from the Holocaust: Do not be a bystander.”
As pointed out in the same article, we don’t have to stretch to see the connection between Trump and Nazism:
This year’s Holocaust remembrance comes at a time when Donald Trump, the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, retweets to his nearly 6 million followers a message from @WhiteGenocideTM based in “Jewmerica,” ….
If that’s not enough, there’s the report that Trump’s ex-wife, Ivana, said Trump regularly read a book of Hitler’s speeches. From Vanity Fair:
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/08/donald-trump-marie-brenner-ivana-divorce
Now, there’s a tendency amongst Democrats to shy away from Hitler comparisons to Trump. I think it’s echoed in First Lady Michelle Obama’s statement: “When they go low, we go high.” However, calling attention to the dangerous possibility of history repeating itself, is not going low.
It bears repeating: “Do not be a bystander.” This is the message we need to send out to protest voters and undecideds.