This week the Wiesenthal Center announced that it had purchased a letter written in 1919, the first statement by a young Adolf Hitler proposing the removal of Jews from Germany.
Flash forward almost one hundred years later, in much of the United States it is now open season on Muslims. The number of attacks on mosques, particularly in the South, is now in the hundreds. Besides Quran burnings and mosque arson, Muslims have been beaten, stabbed, and shot. Even Sikhs (who are not Muslim but who wear turbans) and other brown-skinned people have been attacked. Hate groups freely sponsor talks by bigots like Geerd Wilders, often at churches and synagogues. “Anti-shariah” laws have been sponsored in numerous states; the goal is to outlaw religious courts similar to Jewish battei din, which their ignorant sponsors claim is going to replace secular law (which they want to outlaw themselves by pushing a fundamentalist Christian agenda).
The Southern Poverty Law Center reports a huge resurgence in white militias and hate groups. The Washington Post reports that approximately one hundred cases of domestic, right-wing terrorism have been weakly pursued, or not at all, since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Meanwhile, gays, lesbians, and transgendered people are still trying to get a modicum of justice. In the minds of the same bible-thumping, Quran-burning fundamentalists, permitting Bob and Jim to get married is going to somehow destroy their own marriages.
And it’s all so petty. This morning I read in these pages that permitting transgendered children to use school lavatories would cause the end of civilization as we know it. It probably never occurred to the writer, a former teacher, that the incredibly minuscule number of children who would supposedly throw schools into such chaos could probably simply use the faculty bathrooms.
But the shrill voices just never shut up. We constantly hear attacks on gays in the military, illegal aliens, unions, environmental regulations, helping our neighbors, paying our fair share of taxes, and any number of things of which Ayn Rand would not approve.
Sixteen states have copied Arizona’s anti-Latino bill, SB 1070. The goal? Removing evil “illegal” foreigners from our midst.
And now, this week in our own community, a Guatemalan man was stabbed in a hate crime, allegedly by a thirteen year-old. I don’t know what was worse – the crime itself or the age of the perpetrator.
The specter of Mr. Hitler usually invokes some Jungian archetype of the ultimate evil, unbounded hate that humans simply cannot comprehend, some abstract demonic impulse, something paranormal.
But Mr. Hitler was hardly a demon. He was, unfortunately, much like us. Exactly like us.
Today, if his name were not so widely known, Mr. Hitler’s ideas would be warmly praised by the religious right – as they were in fact for a time in the Thirties here in the U.S. Because what Hitler wanted was not really so different from what the American religious right wanted then and wants today – a “purified” Christianized culture, preferably overflowing with White Protestants.
It was a relatively short twenty years from Hitler’s letter to the Final Solution. People today cannot comprehend how Germany, a nation of rational people, the most advanced technologically at the time, could have permitted itself to slide into insanity so fast.
Do we have to wait another twenty years before we understand?
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