Henry Jay Karp is the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Emanuel in Davenport, Iowa, which he served from 1985 to 2017. He is the co-founder and co-convener of One Human Family QCA, a social justice organization.
In 1990, Michael Godwin observed a phenomenon on internet and proposed a concept known as “Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies.” It stated, “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches one.” Godwin’s law quickly spread to all forms of conversations and debates on hot-button issues.
Folks like me, who did not grasp the meaning of the phrase “approaches one,” have explained it as either “you know the discussion has gone on too long” or “that thread is over and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.” As a writer in the Guardian once reframed it, “The longer an argument runs, the greater the likelihood Hitler gets mentioned.”
The point of this rule is that Nazi analogies are over the top. They are a kind of hyperbole that trivializes an argument, using reckless and thoughtless comparisons to win.
ELIE WIESEL’S VIEWS ON NAZI ANALOGIES
Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor, author, and one of the most respected voices in all things related to the Holocaust, was more responsible than anyone else for raising the general public’s awareness of the atrocity. He did so at a time when post-war sensitivity about its horrors was so raw that people studiously avoided any Holocaust discussion, even when it came from survivors who wanted to share their stories and pain.
I don’t know if Elie Wiesel was ever aware of Godwin’s Rule, but what I do know is that for a long time, he agreed with it. Since the 1950s, long before Godwin introduced his rule, Wiesel insisted that the Holocaust was a historically singular event of absolute evil and that to compare it to any other event is nothing less than trivializing the Holocaust. In that, the overwhelming number of Holocaust scholars, whose works were born out of Wiesel’s efforts, have echoed Wiesel’s views on the singularity and incomparability of the Holocaust.
But by 2017, Godwin no longer considered his law to be absolute. He explained why in an interview with the Washington Post, given shortly after the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. That event underscored the emergence of those embracing fascist or neo-fascist ideologies, and the reassertion of hate groups. When asked after the Charlottesville rally whether his rule still applied when speaking of actual Nazis, Goodwin responded on Twitter, “By all means, compare those sh*theads to the Nazis. Again and again. I’m with you.”
In his interview, Godwin offered a less visceral and more thoughtful answer about modifying his views, one that resonated with my approach to the use of such analogies. He said, “My own instincts as a former reporter, as well as a lawyer, is to make sure you understand everything as much as you can before you go public.” Referring to his writing about such analogies in the Washington Post, he went on to say, “What I wrote was, if you’re reading history before a comparison to Hitler, I’m for that.”
The key phrase here is “if you’re reading history.” If one is going to make Nazi analogies, then one must be able to justify them by pointing out the painful parallels between the events of the day and those of the past. That can, and sometimes must, include events from the Holocaust as well as other events from the darkest pages of human history. As the philosopher George Santayana put it, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Even Elie Wiesel, in his later years, came to recognize that sometimes Holocaust analogies are indeed applicable to contemporary events. In his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, Wiesel said:
[H]ow naive we were, that the world did know and remain silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.
In my writing on events of the day, whether they be in the U.S., in the Middle East, or around the world, I have, at times, resorted to Nazi analogies. At other times, I have criticized the use of Nazi analogies, depending on the facts of the situation.
If I’m not mistaken, the first time I seriously applied a Nazi analogy was during the 2016 presidential campaign, regarding Donald Trump’s proposed Muslim travel ban. I was distressed at how much his proposal sounded like how the United States and so many other nations closed their doors to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, especially since he made it when civilians were desperately seeking refuge from the brutal civil war raging in Syria. Yet when I made that analogy, I received major pushback.
On the other hand, while I actively opposed the cruelty of Donald Trump’s family separation policy, I found it inappropriate and counterproductive to call the detention centers that housed the separated children “concentration camps.”
Calling them “cages,” “substandard living conditions,” describing the very act of separation as “inhumane,” and denouncing what the Trump administration was doing to these families, and especially to these children, as a disgrace to our nation, were all painfully accurate.
But what those detention centers were not, were “concentration camps.” To call them such was not just trivializing the Nazi concentration camp experience but it also served to undermine the message of the opponents of the Separation. Unlike in the Nazi concentration camps, those children were not worked to death, beaten, starved, or forced to live in highly unsanitary, insect-infected, disease-ridden conditions – all of which claimed the lives of millions of inmates, not counting those who were sent to the gas chambers.
Such a false equivalency provided the supporters of the separation policy with an opportunity to falsely claim that in the detention centers the children were treated humanely. What was lost was that those detention centers, and the policy that gave birth to them, did not have to be Nazi concentration camps to serve as one of the more disgraceful moments in American history.
As a Jew, a rabbi, and a teacher of the Holocaust on a university level, I would never dream of using the Holocaust merely to win an argument. The very idea of defying the sanctity of the sacrifices of the victims of the Holocaust disgusts me. They did not die so that I could taste victory. How perverse that would be!
But, on the other hand, if I witness an injustice so very much like one suffered by others during the Holocaust, like Wiesel, I cannot remain silent about the connection between them. To me, that would be as much, if not more so, a desecration of the suffering of those victimized by the Nazis. As an heir to the Holocaust, I cannot erase its horrors, but neither can I ignore them.
What I can do is learn from them, teach them, and do my level best never to allow today’s villains to repeat them. Not only by remembering the Holocaust do I sanctify the memories of its martyrs, but also by standing up, calling out, and opposing those who would seek to visit such injustices upon one group or another of my fellow human beings today, do I sanctify the memories of Hitler’s victims.
While the martyrs of the Holocaust still died brutal and needless deaths, they did not die completely in vain. For the horror of their deaths enabled and empowered me, and so many other people of good conscience, to do our best to protect our fellow human beings from a similar fate. Every time the lessons from the Holocaust help to thwart present-day injustice, the memory of the martyrs is sanctified.
DISTURBING PARALLELS
Tragically, one only needs to listen to news from the U.S. to understand the need to point out the parallels between present-day political rhetoric and some of the worst hate-filled ideologies out of the past. It is chilling to hear politicians spouting language identical to that used by some of history’s worst villains, including the Nazis.
That Donald Trump is an unambiguous bigot is old news. In 1973, the Justice Department sued Trump Management for its policy of housing discrimination against Black people. Both Donald, who was the company’s president, and his father, Fred, the chair of its board, were named as defendants in the case. As a 2016 New York Times article recalling the case pointed out, “It was front-page news, and for Donald, amounted to his debut in the public eye.”
Even then, he echoed the Nazis who, as soon as they ascended to power in 1933, enacted numerous laws excluding Jews from German society. Jewish businesses were boycotted and painted with Stars of David and the word Jude, meaning “Jew,” to intimidate non-Jews from patronizing them. Jews were barred from public parks, movie theatres, and restaurants. Jewish students were harassed in schools and eventually banned from them. There were multiple laws, removing Jews from professions, including jobs serving the government or state-sponsored institutions. Jewish doctors were forbidden from treating non-Jewish patients. Eventually, Jews were evicted from their homes, and after the Nazis invaded Poland, they were driven into walled ghettos.
The exclusion of Jews as a detested minority was central to the Nazi principles of hate. That practice did not begin with the Nazis. Indeed, the first walled ghetto was established in Venice, in 1516, and by the end of the 16th century, ghettos existed throughout Western Europe.
The segregation—the physical isolation—of targeted minorities has continued to this day. Donald Trump has been one of the heirs and perpetrators of that policy, along with the deep-seated hate that always accompanies it.
Who can forget how, in 1989, amid the infamous trial of the Central Park Five, Donald Trump took out full-page ads in four New York City newspapers including the New York Times, calling upon New York State to reinstate the death penalty? As stated in a 2019 New York Times article, though he never mentioned the Central Park Five trial by name, “He made clear that he was voicing this opinion because of the rape and assault of Trisha Meili, a woman who had been jogging in Central Park.”
Recently, the now exonerated Central Park Five have filed a federal defamation lawsuit against Trump for continuing the claim, as recently as during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, that they were guilty.
Neither can we forget how Trump acted in 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the wake of the police execution of George Floyd. He showed his hostility to the Black Lives Matter protests by employing the National Guard and the U.S. military to forcibly break up the demonstrations, and using of tear gas to drive protesters out of Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, to clear the way for him to do a photo op in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church.
Nor can we forget how Trump was a major force behind the “birther movement,” insisting that Barack Obama was not born an American citizen and therefore ineligible to run for president.
Then there are Trump’s ongoing efforts at voter suppression, all in an attempt to limit the voting rights of disadvantaged minorities; people who would tend to vote for candidates that seek to protect the rights of all Americans, regardless of race, religion, gender, national origins, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc. rather than those who envision an America in which such minorities are relegated to second-class citizenship if not completely excluded.
While such racism has been a stain on the American soul since the first slave ship arrived on our shores in 1619, it also was a hallmark of Nazi Germany. When people consider the victims of the Holocaust, they often focus on the Jewish victims. But the Jews, while being the primary victims, were not their only victims. Found imprisoned in the concentration camps, along with the Jews, were Blacks, Gays, Communists, Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political opponents, all wearing color-coded identification badges.
That Donald Trump has been targeting most of the same identity groups as did the Nazis, especially if you consider that European society viewed the Roma as outsiders, much as Trump and his followers consider immigrants today, it should raise red flags for all Americans.
LANGUAGE FROM THE NAZI PLAYBOOK
So much of the language Donald Trump employs comes straight out of the Nazi playbook and the longer history of hate.
Vermin – Donald Trump on many occasions has referred to the immigrants seeking to cross our southern border as “vermin.” In so doing, he sounds no different than Adolf Hitler who said, “When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race (meaning the Jews) that multiplies like vermin?”
How different is Trump’s rhetoric from what Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler told senior SS officers in Poznan in 1943? “It is one of those things it is easy to talk about, ‘the Jewish race is being exterminated,’ says one party member, ‘that is quite clear, it’s in our program, elimination of the Jews, and we are doing it, exterminating them.’ And then they come, 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course, the others are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew. Not one of those who talk this way has watched it, not one of them has gone through it.” As he continued to describe the slaughter they all have participated in, he told them, “that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”
Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor General of occupied Poland, told a group of German soldiers: ”In all these weeks, they (i.e., your families) will be thinking of you, saying to themselves: ‘My God, there he sits in Poland, where there are so many lice and Jews. Perhaps he is hungry and cold, perhaps he is afraid to write.’ It would not be a bad idea to send our dear ones back home a picture, and then say: ‘well now there are not so many lice and Jews any more, and conditions here in the General Government have changed and improved somewhat already. Of course, I could not eliminate all lice and Jews in one year’s time.’”
Julius Streicher was the virulently Antisemitic publisher of the Nazi weekly magazine, Der Sturmer. Its front page usually carried a cartoon attacking the Jews. In December 1927, the cover cartoon depicted a dead tree, with a Nazi pumping poison gas into its roots, surrounded by dead rats. The caption read, “When the vermin are dead, the German oak will flourish once more.”
There is a famous Nazi propaganda film entitled “The Eternal Jew.” It is rife with references to Jews as vermin but the most powerful is an entire segment dedicated to comparing the Jews to a plague of rats that has invaded Europe. Using disturbing images of swarms of rats destroying food stores and filling the screen, the narrator relates:
Rats have been parasites on mankind from the very beginning… Wherever rats turn up, they carry destruction to the land by destroying mankind’s goods and nourishment and spreading diseases and plagues such as cholera, dysentery, leprosy, and typhoid fever. They’re cunning, cowardly, and cruel, and usually appear in massive hoards. They represent the elements of sneakiness and subterranean destruction among animals just as the Jews do among mankind. The parasite nation of Judah is responsible for a large part of international crime. In 1932, the Jews who made up only 1% of the world’s population, accounted for 34% of dope peddlers and 47% of robberies, 47% of crooked games of chance, 82% of international crime organizations, and 98% of dealers in prostitution.
It is clear that when Donald Trump chooses to call aspiring Americans vermin, there is no original thinking involved in it. He is parroting some of the vilest hate speech the Nazis spewed upon the world, and he is doing so with equal venom.
CRIMINALS AND SEXUAL PREDATORS
Criminals – As you can see from the short transcript of the narrative from “The Eternal Jew,” Trump has also borrowed heavily from the Nazis when it comes to his accusing those Aspiring Americans of flooding our nation with crime. Like the Nazis before him, Trump labels today’s immigrants as drug dealers, rapists, criminal gangs, and perverters of our society.
Sexual Predators – Let us not ignore Trump’s claim that immigrants are rapists. Charging minority groups as sexual predators is as old as hate speech itself. There are many instances in Medieval Christian art where Jewish men are depicted with bulging loins; as a threat to the purity of Christian women. That was but one of the hate-filled myths that was carried forward through the ages.
By the time of the Nazis, they took it so seriously that in 1935, when they enacted the Nuremberg Race Laws, those laws included prohibitions against sexual relations between Jews and Aryans, as well as forbidding Jews to hire Aryan female household staff, ages 45 and younger, for fear that Jewish men would rape these women. There was even a German children’s book, The Poisonous Mushroom, beautifully illustrated, in which each chapter described another way that Jews were evil. One of those chapters deals with the danger Jewish men pose to Aryan maidens.
Of course, the labeling of men from targeted identity groups as being sexual predators has become one of the standards of bigotry, having been applied to multiple vulnerable and targeted minorities. Many a Black man was lynched in the South for having posed a sexual threat to white women. Indeed, that was the grounds upon which Donald Trump called for the death penalty for the Central Park 5.
This charge has also been applied to the LGBTQIA+ community. Until the 1980s, gays were not permitted to teach in public schools, for fear of them molesting children. Today, that charge has been revived, and Donald Trump is one of those who feeds those fires, as across America, some claim that those who are transgender pose a threat to our children, seeking to groom them, especially in our schools, convincing them to abandon heterosexuality and join the ranks of the transgendered. Once again, Nazi-like bigotry has found its way into American political dialogue.
BLOOD OR RACIAL PURITY
Poisoning the Blood of our Country – Another of the hate tropes Donald Trump has employed in his rallies is that of immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” The concept of blood or racial purity predates the Nazis by centuries.
To put it into historical perspective, we need to turn to medieval Spain. The presence of Jews in Spain dates at least as far back as the 2nd century but possibly even to shortly after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple, in 70 C.E. As early as 589, at the 3rd Council of Toledo, the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church issued laws restricting Jewish participation in society.
Matters worsened for the Jews until Spain was conquered by the Muslims, in 711. Muslim rule provided the Jews with a much-needed and appreciated respite from persecution. However, as the Christian reconquest of Spain gradually proceeded, the plight of its Jews once again deteriorated. In 1391, massive anti-Jewish riots broke out, with thousands killed and even more forcibly converted to Christianity. It was not long before a distinction was made between Old Christians and New Christians – Jews who had been converted.
In Toledo, in 1449, thirteen years before the 1492 Spanish expulsion of the Jews & the start of the Spanish Inquisition, the first Limpieza de Sangre – Blood Purity law was enacted, denying New Christians several rights afforded to Old Christians. Later Blood Purity laws were to follow, defining Old Christians as those who could trace their Christian ancestry back to before the 1391 forced conversion of the Jews.
JEW-HATRED IN MODERN EUROPE
Jumping ahead in history, the Industrial Revolution would not only change the economy of Europe, and eventually the world, but would play a major force in dramatically altering the fundamental nature of society. Its ideological offspring was the Age of Enlightenment, which provided a philosophical understanding of how the European view of how society functioned had forever changed. It marked the end of Feudalism, in which social status had been divided into the nobility class and the peasant class, Christians and non-Christians, and redefined social status as being based upon people’s productivity and how much they contributed to the wellbeing of society.
This not only started the shift of the power from the Nobles to the People but also undercut the religious foundations of Jew-hatred, cracking open the door to Jewish acceptance as productive members of society. It was the Enlightenment that fueled the spirits of both the American and French Revolutions, with their emphasis on such values as “inalienable rights,” freedom, and human equality.
When Napolean conquered most of Europe, he imposed the principles of the French Revolution – “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” – upon every nation he ruled. One way in which he did that was to tear down the ghetto walls and admit the Jews into the general society.
However, following the defeat of Napolean, across Europe, there was a backlash, particularly against the Jews.
With the undermining of the religious foundations of Jew-hatred – hating Jews as Christ Killers and their rejection of Christianity as the one true faith – new reasons needed to be found to justify this ongoing hatred. Ernest Renan, a 19th-century French philosopher, provided that justification with a new racial theory, strikingly similar to the Spanish concept of Limpieza de Sangre – Blood Purity. He was the first to declare that the Jewish race was inherently inferior to the Aryan one. By redefining Jews as a race, which they are not, conversion to Christianity could no longer provide Jews with an escape hatch from anti-Jewish persecution. It would mark them as being inherently and incurably “Jewish.”
However, it was not until 1879, when Wilhelm Marr, a German journalist, popularized Renan’s racial concept, using it as the basis for perpetual Jew hatred in his pamphlet, The Way to Victory of Germanism Over Judaism. He also adopted a term coined by a Jewish scholar, Moritz Steinschneider, a contemporary of Ernest Renan, who, responding to Renan’s depiction of the Jews as “inferior,” called it “antisemitische vorurteile – Antisemitic prejudices.” Steinschneider based this phrase on the term “Semitic,” first framed in 1781, to describe a group of Near Eastern cognate languages that included Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, & Ugaritic. Marr successfully redefined Jews as not only being racially inferior but as an existential threat to the purity of the Aryan race.
The Nazis went whole-hog buying into the racial theories of Renan and Marr. They became a pillar of Nazi ideology. As they were fond of declaring “Die Juden Sind Unser Unglülck! – The Jews are Our Misfortune!” Often when speaking of the Jews, they referred to them as “race defiling,” for the defilement of the Aryan race was the greatest fear they instilled in the German populace.
When Donald Trump speaks often and openly of immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country,” he is not just alluding to Nazi hate speech, he is citing it verbatim. He stands on the shoulders of bigots going back 1,500 years.
BLOOD LIBEL
Haitians Eating Neighbors’ Household Pets – When Donald Trump speaks of Haitian immigrants stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets, it sends a chill down my spine. My mind instantly defaults to what we Jews call “The Blood Libel.” It was a vicious and lethal lie about Jews that made the rounds during the Middle Ages. According to this slander, Christians believed that at Passover time, Jews would kidnap Christian children, slaughter them, and then use their blood in the baking of Matzah, the unleavened bread Jews traditionally eat on Passover.
Wherever this rumor was spread, there was sure to be a bloody anti-Jewish riot, with murder, rape, and unspeakable torture. The accusation Trump leveled against the Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio was nothing less than a modern-day Blood Libel.
Blood Libels, like so many other hateful, unfounded defamations, have survived the test of time, cropping up and directed by groups against those they deemed their enemies. In the early modern period, the Roma were accused of stealing babies. The Nazis reveled in spreading such falsehoods about the Jews. Even in our day, in America, we witnessed QAnon accuse the Democrats of kidnapping children and sacrificing them in the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor which, as it turned out, didn’t even have a basement.
So it continues as Donald Trump uses his contemporary Blood Libel against Haitian immigrants to strike fear and anger into the hearts of his supporters.
THE ENEMY WITHIN
The Enemy Within – This concept also is far from original to Donald Trump. It was first expressed by the post-Napoleanic German nationalist, Ernst Arndt, in the 19th Century. In his hatred of both the French and the Jews, he declared the French to be Germany’s External Enemy and the Jews, its Internal Enemy. Like others who would follow him, he held that the Internal Enemy posed a far greater threat than the External one. This principle of considering the Jews the Internal Enemy became yet another pillar of Nazi ideology.
In 1975, Holocaust scholar Lucy Dawidowicz stunned even her fellow Holocaust scholars when, in her book, The War Against the Jews, she revealed just how seriously the Nazi regime viewed the Jews as their greatest threat. In it, she demonstrated incontrovertibly that during the Second World War, the Nazis were waging two separate wars; one against the Allies, and the other against the Jews.
Not only that, but Dawidowicz presented irrefutable proof that when the Nazi hierarchy had to choose between materially supporting either the war against the Allies or the war against the Jews, they almost always chose to support the war against the Jews; the war against the Enemy From Within rather than the one against Enemy From Without.
It was not only the Jews whom the Nazis considered to be the Enemies from Within, but also those who opposed them or stood in their way as they sought total power over Germany. A mere two months after they assumed power, the Nazis opened their first concentration camp – Dachau. Their first prisoners were not Jews but political opponents, Communists, and journalists who spoke out against them. With every passing year, the circle of those who they sent to Dachau grew wider; all considered a threat to the Nazi state. They even declared it a crime to criticize Nazi policy.
Long before Donald Trump, the threat of “The Enemy from Within” reared its ugly head in the U.S. In the 1950s, the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy waged his anti-Communist Red Scare campaign, in which he terrorized the nation and, in the process, destroyed the lives of many Americans who were publicly interrogated and defamed by his House Un-American Activities Committee. During a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, while raging against the dangers of the Communist threat, he proclaimed, “As one of our outstanding historical figures once said, ‘When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be from enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within.’”
Ironically, the “outstanding historical figure” to which he referred was none other than Abraham Lincoln. It was from his 1838 speech before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, in which Lincoln appropriately accused those who were battling over the issue of slavery by resorting to lawlessness, violence, and destruction, completely disregarding the rule of law, as being the “enemies from within.” Sounds similar to the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6! McCarthy, on the other hand, like the Nazis before him, abused his power to destroy the lives of anyone who opposed or disagreed with him.
Arresting, Imprisoning, & Even Executing Political Opponents and Critics – Today, we see Donald Trump declaring his desire to be a dictator “only on day one,” but we know that is not how dictators roll. He has no qualms about publicly sharing who he considers the “Enemies for Within,” and his list is practically identical to those of the Nazis and Joe McCarthy. The long list of persecutions suffered by the Jews has taught my people the hard truth, “If they tell us what they are going to do, believe them!”
In a very short time, the American people will select our next president. So where does all this leave us when it comes to the question of the appropriateness of making Nazi analogies regarding the pressing issues of our day, especially since this election has the potential of dramatically transforming the essential nature of how the United States is governed in the future?
THE STAKES FOR DEMOCRACY
What are the stakes? Once again, a Nazi analogy.
After Germany’s defeat in World War I and the abdication of its Kaiser, the German people established a democratic form of government called the Weimar Republic. This government created the most liberal constitution in Europe. It was a true democracy in the finest sense of the term. Yes, old prejudices existed among its populace, but being a democracy, those who professed those prejudices enjoyed the freedom of speech and assembly. They had multiple political parties. Included among them was the National Social Workers Party, better known as the Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler.
In 1923, Hitler and his party attempted a coup – The Munich Beer Hall Putsch – but it failed. Hitler was arrested, tried, and sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison. It was there that he wrote his famous manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). He was released after serving only 9 months.
In the Reichstag (Pariamentary) election of November 1932, the Nazi Party proved victorious, capturing the largest number of seats. On January 30, 1933, ten years after his attempted coup, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. By March 23, the Nazi-controlled Reichstag passed a law called the “Enabling Act” which gave Hitler and the Nazis Party the power to enact laws, without Reichstag approval, for four years. That law marked the end of democracy in Germany, transforming that nation into the worst fascist state in human history.
People say, “It can’t happen here!” The roots of American democracy run too deep to be overturned. It is one of the arguments against making Nazi analogies.
A few days from now, that premise will be tested once and for all. We want to believe that it can’t happen here, that American democracy cannot be replaced by some sort of despotic system of government. But we must not ignore the fact that what was perhaps the finest democracy in Europe was so replaced, not by a violent revolution, though the Nazis tried it in 1923, but by a democratic electoral process; by voters who were convinced that a dictator is better than an accountable president, that tyranny is better than democracy, that the fires of bigotry should burn brighter than the torch of freedom.
For liberals such as myself, it is incomprehensible that the current presidential polling should be so close. Today, more than ever before in American history, the battle for the White House is clearly a battle of good over evil, justice over injustice, freedom over oppression, human rights over retribution and persecution. For decent people – and most Americans are decent people – it should be a no-brainer. But for some reason, it isn’t.
The polling tells us the election is a toss-up. But when I consider what a Trump victory will look like, all I can think of is what it looked like in Nazi Germany, when overwhelming throngs of supposedly decent Germans crowded the streets and public gathering places to catch a glimpse of the Fuhrer passing by. They raised their voices in cheers, their arms in the Nazi salute, and waved swastika flags. Did they know that the end of it all would look like the film footage of the carnage, the deprivation, and the unspeakable horror, found by the Allied troops when they liberated the concentration camps?
“It can’t happen here!” Well, perhaps it can. Consider what Donald Trump has told us he plans to do once in power. Consider how so much of what he is telling us is so similar to what dark deeds the Nazis performed. Perhaps it can happen here.
AN AGENDA OF PREJUDICE IN RED STATES
Perhaps it already is happening here – Over the last several years, many state legislatures have been translating an agenda of prejudice and intolerance into state law. They have redefined being different as being criminal.
My own state, Iowa, is a case in point.
Iowa has banned classroom discussions of topics related to the lives of the LGBTQIA+ community, as well as the teaching of the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory. Books addressing the lives of gay, Black, or other students from marginalized communities also have been banned. Also, our schools are being required to forcibly out their transgender students. Transgender students are banned from participating in the school sports teams of their chosen gender. If that were not enough, it is illegal to provide youth with gender-affirming drugs.
The Iowa legislature has also enacted several voter suppression laws that victimize vulnerable minorities, be they elderly, disabled, economically deprived, those needing to work two jobs to make ends meet, etc. They have banned convenient ballot drop boxes, shortened the early-voting period, and have reduced the time polls are open on election day by an hour. All of these changes are intended to make access to voting difficult for those with the least freedom of flexible hours, a distinction that all too often is determined by socioeconomic class.
Following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the Iowa legislature passed its “Back the Blue Law” that, in the event of public protests, grants law enforcement officers exceptional protections and singularly punishes peaceful protesters. It even gives protection to drivers who strike and injure individuals who are participating in a “protest, demonstration, riot or unlawful assembly or who is engaging in disorderly conduct and is blocking traffic in a public street or highway.”
Iowa’s governor and legislature have a troubling history when it comes to immigrant issues. In the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, long before vaccines were available, when the order of the day was mask-wearing, social distancing, and handwashing, when throughout the nation, states were requiring business closures to stem the spread of the disease, our governor required workers in the meat packing industry, many of whom were immigrants, to report to work in conditions that can only be described as COVID incubators.
This is the same governor who rejected federal funds to assist immigrant children; the same governor who used federal funds earmarked for COVID relief to send Iowa National Guard troops to defend the southern border from immigrants seeking refuge in our country.
This year, the Iowa legislature enacted a law that made it a criminal offense for undocumented immigrants to enter the state. However, a federal district court issued a temporary injunction blocking it. Responding to the injunction, our governor said, “I signed this bill into law to protect Iowans and our communities from the results of this border crisis: rising crime, overdose deaths, and human trafficking.”
A different Iowa law enacted this year was disguised as a strengthening of the protection of religious freedom. It could empower businesses and organizations to claim, on religious grounds, their right to deny services to people because of their gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, and race.
Even if Donald Trump is defeated in November, the work of saving democracy is not complete. It can never be complete until we reverse the damage done by state legislators who have traded in their responsibility to protect all the people under their care for using their power to pursue policies born of hate and malice.
Hate is hate, there’s no getting around it. It is hideous and it is dangerous. But when hate becomes state-sponsored, as it did in Nazi Germany, it rises to a whole different level of threat to society. To protect the integrity of a democratic society, it is up to its citizenry, not to stand idly by as spectators, but to serve as democracy’s defenders. That means standing in defense of hate’s victims, and, if necessary, unseating those in power or aspiring to power, who seek to use the government as a vehicle of hate.
We may take our democracy for granted, but it is a fragile and precious commodity. There will always be those who would gladly replace it with a system in which some have power and the rest serve their need or simply disappear. It is not a matter of “It can’t happen here” but rather of it must not happen here. The only ones who make the difference, for good or for ill, are those who act and who vote. As Elie Wiesel said, “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
It is time to choose a side. There is no neutral ground.
Top photo: An old published photo from the 1930s of Adolf Hitler on the third day of the Nazi party conference in Nuremberg in 1929. Available via Shutterstock.