In the early 70’s I was working in Germany, living in a low-rent district near the train station in a small city in Baden-Württemberg. I occasionally watched the evening news with my elderly landlady, who had grown up in the same building she now rented out. After a news segment touching on Germany’s Nazi past I asked her what she and her parents had known of the trains that took Jews to their deaths from the train station just a few blocks away: “Gar nichts!” (absolutely nothing) was her emphatic and earnest-sounding response.
Of course this was a lie — millions of people had been arrested, stripped of their possessions, spirited away on a vast transportation network constructed expressly for an extermination project, gassed and turned into powder all over Europe. Sports facilities in some cities were not available to the public because they had been commandeered as staging areas for concentration camp transport.
The Nazis began their Reinigung (cleansing) in 1939 by first “euthanizing” disabled and mentally-ill family members of even non-Jews. The photo above of a work party from Dachau was taken by a German civilian who simply snapped it from his balcony in 1945.
For years atrocities went on under everyone’s eyes. Who could not have known?
The Holocaust, just like today’s Gaza genocide, was no secret to either the Nazis or the Allied powers. Every Western power simply ignored the Holocaust, denied it, cast doubt on its scope and scale, or lied about the desperate plight of Jews when asked to help save their fellow human beings. For these Western powers, Jews were apparently not fully human.
In 1943, shortly before Yom Kippur, 400 rabbis marched on Washington to plead with Franklin Delano Roosevelt to rescue European Jews from the ovens. FDR, a Democrat like any today, myopically focused on domestic issues, told the rabbis to go take a hike. FDR also made no effort to destroy German rail infrastructure critical to the transport of so many to mass slaughter, even when advised it would save lives. Fortunately for FDR, social media hadn’t yet been invented to document his sins of omission and commission.
The 1917 Balfour Declaration, addressed to Lord Rothschild and conveyed to the British Zionist Federation, which “gave” Palestine for Jewish settlement, was not offered out of love but in order to facilitate British Jews leaving the country, and also to raise money for the war effort. British antisemitism also determined the response to the desperate plight of European Jews. As Louise London documents in “Whitehall and the Jews: 1933-1948,” the British government had no use for refugees, especially more Jews. Britain simply let them die, like FDR.
This is more or less where we are today with Palestinians — the world’s new Jews. But this time, rather than simply ignoring mass atrocities and loss of life, Western colonial powers are actually contributing to the genocide through arms sales, diplomatic cover, boots on the ground, and boats in the Gulf — and then lying about it, denying the root cause of the conflict, disputing the severity of human suffering, defending the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians, and recycling propaganda points provided by the Israeli Foreign Ministry and a galaxy of domestic lobbying groups that serve only Israel’s interests.
The biggest lie of all is that this is a war Israel is waging to protect itself. Like a parody of the Manchurian Candidate (“Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life”), politician after politician gets up before the cameras, repeating virtually the same words, “Israel has a right to defend itself and has the ironclad support of the United States,” when referring to a slow-motion genocide.
This is a genocide that began — not as a response to October 7th, 2023 — but with the massacres, terror, and mass-expulsions of Palestinians by Yishuv (pre-Israel) terrorist groups in 1947 that created the state of Israel. American support for this has led to decades of loss, dispossession, and exile for Palestinians. Now, led by Israel’s most far-right government of all time, including nationalists literally calling for genocide, Americans are still siding with the original perpetrator and waving away the latest genocide.
Think of all the genocides we have managed to ignore in our lifetime. Some of the blame is personal. Sticking one’s head in the sand when faced with horrific barbarity — especially from our so-called “friends” — and having no real political power to stop it, seems to be a reaction typical of the human societies and governments we have inherited.
Local newspapers play their part in keeping us unaware or distracted by mindless fluff. This is what the New Bedford Standard Times has written about Gaza: virtually nothing. The New Bedford Light, originally conceived to shed light on important topics (and I would include Gaza), has refused for the better part of a year to report on local efforts to stop the slaughter in Gaza. These publications apparently regard genocide as not “newsworthy” — or their timidity betrays political bias or a fear of alienating sponsors and advertisers.
When the media is not deep-sixing articles on Gaza, mass-producing fluff, or blatantly censoring its reporters, it pulls on its fatigues and boots and ten-huts, proudly serving in the propaganda wars that obscure the history of Israel’s colonization of Palestine or de-contextualize the conflict. Too many news sources, notably the New York Times, demonstrate lazy journalism, outright bias, violations of professional ethics, or simply toss journalistic standards in the dumpster.
In politics, consider also how institutionalized the denial of the Gaza genocide has become throughout government, Republican and Democrat alike. Even with widespread knowledge of the scope of destruction — and Gaza is the best-documented genocide in world history — Western “democracies” still do exactly what my old German landlady did: deny, deflect, and lie.
And if you’re a nationalist propagandist or lobbyist or a politician receiving money from any of them — Christian Nationalist or Zionist, it makes no difference — you follow the Narcissist’s playbook — deny, attack, and make yourself the victim. And there seems to be a willing market for their disinformation.
In the case of Gaza, there is no information deficit, nor is there a deficit of empathy and humanity. Despite the moral darkness of this politically-unchallenged genocide and the sheer madness of a nation which exploits the phrase “never again” while actually doing it again, I still believe in the inherent decency of humankind and refuse to accept that a majority of us values life so cheaply as our politicians.
And polls confirm my woolly-headed, idealistic views — a majority of Americans want a ceasefire and disapprove of Israel’s crimes against humanity and the Zionist nation’s genocidal destruction of Gaza. Americans are, truly, decent people. But they are also mute and spineless, too fond of their vast military, too attached to the creature comforts an advanced Capitalist economy provides, too credulous when fed heaping, stinking propaganda.
As a consequence we have a foreign policy and a hyper-aggressive militarism no one ever wanted and no one ever voted for, almost always imposed on the world’s most oppressed people. This is what Americans call “democracy” without a trace of irony.
In my own lifetime our nation has been responsible for the deaths of millions of people — slaughtered in the name of anti-communism, or the war on terror, or the war on drugs, or for “peacekeeping” missions, or in the “defense” of authoritarian, repressive regimes, and — now — as a willing participant in a genocide. Americans not only have blood on our hands; we are dipping them into a bucket of blood every day we remain complicit in the elimination of Gaza.
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