This
week I visited the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum for the first time. That’s a humbling admission
considering it was completed nearly 26 years ago. Although my visits to DC are
rare, I remember in the early years I was thwarted by its popularity, which
didn’t allow for walk-in visits. I’m glad I went, belated though it was, and
for reasons I wasn’t expecting.
It
is a daunting exhibit with much more to see (and especially read) than can be
accomplished during the length of a normal museum visit. For someone with
limited historical perspective I would think it would be shocking to absorb the
enormity of the inhumanity that occurred during the 1940s. However, I consider
myself reasonably versed in the history of that period and there was not much I
encountered that I would consider new.
That
is not to say that deeper emotions, regardless of intellect, wouldn’t surface. For
example, the display of victim’s actual shoes given to the museum, thousands of
shoes, was certainly a moment that took me to a place of profound discomfort
and reflection.
Considering
that most all of what I read and observed was already part of my knowledge base
including the social cruelty and political brutality which ran as an undercurrent
beneath the military events of the period, I was personally curious what my
takeaway would be. Would I have an insight I didn’t have before I entered the
museum? I believe I did.
What
I hadn’t appreciated before was the enormous complexity of it all. Most abbreviated histories that a majority of
Americans are exposed to center around the rise of Hitler and a relatively small
cadre of men that surrounded him and how they manipulated individuals, both
learned and simple, to support them in their quest for power and military
conquest.
They
are the ones credited with spearheading the mostly crude but sometimes mechanical
ethnic cleansing of millions of innocent, mostly Jews, as a means to an end
(power), not as part of some depraved philosophical ethic.
Leaving
the museum I gained an intuitive understanding that it wasn’t that simple.
Hitler
and his close followers were like an autoimmune disease. They were created in
an environment which made it possible for them to make ordinary people turn on
accepted social values like a body’s immune system turning on itself. That
environment was of fiscal deprivation, fear associated with uncertainty, and a
clinging to exclusivity for moral support, all of which were prevalent in the
1930s.
Hitler
may have set a tone and initiated policy, but the 1940s Holocaust was just as
equally caused by millions of small decisions and actions made all over Europe,
including the intentional failure of actions not taken around the world.
The
real shocker for me was the obvious realization that the ingredients which made
the Holocaust possible are just as real today and never more prevalent as they have
been over the past 3 years.
Politics
and social behavior in this America is no longer about policy. It’s not even
about money, since the concept of national debt has become irrelevant. It has
become tribal and socially segregating.
If
you’ve watched a Trump “rally” (and you should) you can see that it is an
endless attack on the personal characteristics of his perceive opponents,
peppered with aggrandizing his mythical successes. He is unlocking inhibited behavior
and satisfying his supporters need for inclusion and safety, no different than eugenics
gave solace to wanton discrimination.
What
is a nation that says “America first” and proceeds to define that America as a
place that “valiantly stops invasions” of ethnic diversity. What is a nation
that says “America first” then calls out any source of information that doesn’t
actively support the President as “fake”. What is a nation that says “America
first” and creates an entire party of leaders that defend corruption and bizarre
conspiracies to maintain power. To use
endless fear as the engine for making “America first” is the same secret sauce
that made the Holocaust possible.
In
a way I wish colloquial use of the term “Holocaust” had not become a noun.
Although it communicates inhumanity to a scale that in the modern world has no
equal, I would have preferred that it was a verb. The abhorrent behavior of leaders
made acceptable and adoptable over time is a rolling form of holocaust, so
complex in nature that, undeterred, may rival history for its depravity and number
of victims.
All
things being equal, we may be only one financial catastrophe away from
something even worse.
