Auschwitz, Memory, and US Elections

A couple of weeks ago, I was privileged to visit Auschwitz for a second time. It’s a visit that no one should want to make, but that everyone should feel obliged to make if it is at all possible. The horrific atrocities perpetuated by the Nazis against those who were deemed “Other” must be remembered so as to avoid them ever happening again.

There, however, is the hard part. Remembering. It’s not simply remembering what happened, but how it happened. We must look with tear-filled eyes at the rooms of human hair, personal belongings, and pictures of women, men, and children, remembering those who were ruthlessly slaughtered by the Nazi regime. We must also remember the nationalistic zeal and the xenophobic rhetoric that enabled such evil to go almost unopposed.

Why?

No one proposes the gas chamber on the campaign trail.

They stoke irrational fear of the other; they try to separate us from them; they feed upon nationalistic passions and ostracize and marginalize anyone who doesn’t look, act, or think like they do.

They propose a travel ban on all people of a certain religion.

They classify entire ethnicities and nationalities as criminal.

They promise a return to the way things used to be, before all these other people came in and messed it all up.

And while they may not propose mass extermination, they dehumanize the other person. They advocate the torture of our enemies, the murder of family members of suspected terrorists, and verbal and physical violence against those who disagree with us or who don’t look like us.

Granted, many will shudder at any comparison between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler, and for that reason I am not making one.  Nor am I proposing that if Trump is elected president, the horrors of Auschwitz are guaranteed to follow.

What I am saying is that the tribalistic and nationalistic fears upon which Donald Trump is basing his campaign are the very same kinds of fears that the Nazis used to rise to power. And if we are to remember the horrors of Auschwitz rightly, we must name that. The horrors of Auschwitz didn’t begin with the gas chamber. They began with anti-semitic sentiments and the scapegoating of anyone who looked, thought, or acted different. They continued into the denial of human rights, and that led to the mass extermination of millions of of people.

God forbid that any nation revisit that road that led to the holocaust, but we must recognize and denounce the warning signs when we see them. The scapegoating and the dehumanization of the “Other” are such signs. Our problems are not caused by Muslims, Hispanics, or any other “Other.” The world isn’t that simple, nor are our problems.

And any candidate on any party’s ticket who feeds upon xenophobia, nationalism, and authoritarianism must be denounced. If not, our silence will only be seen as complicity.

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me 

-Martin Niemoller