A Rolling Holocaust

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.