I have held hands with a woman who survived the camps.
I have visited Dachau.
I’m not a stranger to the evil that people do. I consider civilization to be a horror, populated by people who would generally be good if they weren’t powering a system that is literally gnawing its way through all life on the planet on the way to its own extinction. I speak out against modern nazis because, yes, the people I’m talking about are that bad.
They are people who know what a nazi is historically and still spout the rhetoric about white supremacy and how bad it is to mix the blood. Or push the idea that white European “democracy” is the only civilization that has advanced anything on the planet. They bay about how we must protect the planet by segregating people in their proper places (“obviously” white people are the best to take care of natures since the filthy savages in the filthy ghettos are exposing their immoral attitudes only).
These people are pushing hard for exactly the return to the camps you are talking about, except openly and knowing exactly what it entails. They were ecstatic when Trump was in power, dog-whistling, opening camps and segregating populations. They push for more at damn near every edge society I was involved with.
You Can’t Just Sit on the Sidelines
The vast majority of the Republican party are not these people per se (I’m not going to say they are not nazis because of what I’m going to say next). What the vast majority of the active Republican party seems to be is people who (a) want to hurt the Democrats very, very badly, and if you are not “with them” then you are a Democrat; and (b) have no problem letting the nazis I’ve described above do their thing openly and freely because what the nazis do is rile up Democrats.
These are not the people who are going to shove you in a truck and kill you. These are people who are going to pay their taxes and then wonder if the black smoke from those weird smokestacks is going to hurt their lungs… and then they’ll move on from that topic. They’ll tsk tsk you and then report you to the small percent that are willing to hunt you down and hurt you.
There’s a meme that keeps going around that says if you see nine people seated comfortably at a table with a nazi, then you are actually seeing ten nazis.I believe that. But I’m a reasonable men. I’m only interested in targeting the overt, actual nazis. The Proud Boys and their ilk. The people who are throwing molotov cocktails at the homeless folks in my neighborhood. The ones that were storming into community meetings to frighten POC neighbors specifically.
Oh, But What If It’s Just a Little Bit Racist…
In the past few years, I’ve had people press me hard about “the Jewish problem”, talk about killing homeless, and move into social media spaces that were previously just fine, often introduced in there by the other 90% that were going “well… I’m not racist but -some- of the stuff they say makes sense.”
Before the Holocaust, people were screaming long and loud that something was going very wrong. I’m doing that right now. There’s a ten percent out there that are fighting for a power we do not want them to have. It’s not a political thing. It’s a hate thing. And I have family and friends to protect.Violence is hell. We agree. But I’m not empowering the nazis. They’re coming after me and mine.
This struggle isn’t easy and I want folks to know how much I appreciate the peacekeepers. We need to keep up that dynamic so that boundaries are made that can both protect us and heal. It would be so easy to just let everything be “black and white”. And wow, how loaded that term is. There’s a lot of compromises and maneuvers that have to be done.
May they keep pushing for the day when we can’t afford this kind of thinking. Because everyone has given up this level of insanity and it goes back to human-level arguments.
I’m praying for that day.