Speak Its Name: Yes, This Is Naziism

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History never repeats exactly the same, which is how it can be hard to recognize when it is indeed repeating—too many little things may be different the second time around for subsequent events to be a perfect twin of the previous. But it’s the big things that often reappear in similar ways that are meaningful. As they are here, which is why it’s time to recognize: for all intents and purposes, how the government of the United States of America is behaving is just like how the German Nazis behaved. It is doing to the people within its national embrace exactly what the Nazis did to theirs. The comparison to 20th Century Nazi Germany is not something that 21st Century America is still working up to; it’s where we have already arrived.

That we have not (yet) set up an Auschwitz-Birkenau, replete with crematoria, is not evidence to the contrary. After all, the German Nazis didn’t just suddenly start killing millions in the 1940s; their crimes against humanity began years earlier, in the 1930s. Even Hitler himself referred to the mass murder Auschwitz facilitated as the “final solution,” because it was the tactic deployed only after he had already committed plenty of other atrocities first—atrocities that look an awful lot like the ones we are inflicting now upon the human beings in our own national midst.

In the case of both nations the atrocities began, as such horrors often do, with the “othering” of people, as if there were those who, by virtue of something about their own humanity, were somehow disqualified from being part of our national community. While the Trump Administration may have begun by ostensibly focusing on “illegal immigrants”—which itself is a grotesquely deceptive label (an immigrant cannot be illegal; an immigrant can only immigrate illegally, and, for the most part, such illegality is but a civil or misdemeanor offense and not the heinously lawless act the administration paints it as)—like the German Nazis it has also stigmatized racial, religious, and ethnic groups comprising America’s cultural tapestry, as well as LGBTQ+ people. The rhetoric it espouses is all about conditioning the public to believe that there are some people who belong in America, and some who need to be expunged from it, so that the public will get on board aiding, supporting, and even celebrating the expunging that will soon follow.

The horror in both countries then continues by upending the law such that the targeted people cannot legally belong anymore. In Germany we saw how Jewish families who had been in the country for generations suddenly lost their rights as citizens. Here in the U.S. denaturalization has so far only been threatened, albeit palpably, but for non-citizens whose presence in the country has so far been entirely lawful, the Trump Administration has been unilaterally changing that status, moving people from welcomed additions to our community to accused interlopers who must be expelled and, per the government, right now.

But before the expulsions can happen, first the targeted people need to be rounded up. And so a force of federal police has been showing up at people’s homes, schools, jobs, health care providers, bus stops, and anywhere American life takes place to arrest people, without warrants or due process, for no crime at all other than existing. Even if not yet officially prisoners, everyone targeted by the regime has already been made to be, by forcing them to withdraw from life in fear. Governor Walz is absolutely right: there is some child writing a new diary about what it is like to have to hide from a lawless regime incapable of respecting the law and liberties that are supposed to protect them, just like the German Nazis refused to respect any of it either.

After rounding its targets up, the American government then does what the German Nazis did and “concentrate” those they have snatched in detention centers, or, as in the case of some of the larger complexes, “camps,” if you will. There these people—even small children—are kept as un-convicted prisoners, unable to leave on their own volition while, just like the Nazis’ victims, they are forced to live in inhumane conditions—assuming they manage to stay alive at all. Here history has been loudly echoing once again, as the stories emerging from America’s human warehouses are, as the German Nazis’ were, tales of inadequate food and healthcare, brutality by the guards, and indifferent murder.

The comparison to history does not even stop there. For instance, German Nazis also liked to banish their prisoners to far-flung nations where they could be imprisoned instead. It is an example the Trump Administration has already followed, such as by sending its own to places like CECOT in El Salvador or other nations around the world where a secret flight could be sent in accordance with a secret deal made with a regime willing to accommodate America’s evil. Furthermore, the Trump Administration has continued to walk in the path of the German Nazis in its penalization of any dissenting voice that would challenge its actions. Here, too, opponents of the regime have also become targets of its brutal power, being entered into databases, surveilled, and even summarily executed.

Naturally there are of course some differences between then and now. In fact, one of the biggest differences between what the Germany Nazis of the 1930s and 1940s did then and what the United States government is doing now is that we’re mostly using airplanes instead of box cars to traffic innocent people to places where at best they are imprisoned, often tortured, and generally put in mortal peril. And, unlike the German Nazis, who were meticulous in their paperwork, our government can’t seem to be bothered keeping track of whom we have sent to their doom. But apart from these differences what is happening now is still fundamentally the same as what happened then. Families are still being broken up, children are effectively being orphaned (even citizen children, who are also being expatriated), and lives and futures are being destroyed, if not ended outright. All without due process, and in grotesque volume, just as during the Holocaust.

However, there is another important difference: that so many in America can see what is happening for what it is and be willing to stand against it. There are of course stories from the Holocaust of people resisting Nazism and trying to save their neighbors—Anne Frank’s, for instance—but history lacks good analogs to what is happening now, like in Minnesota, where virtually the entire community has stood in solidarity to shield their neighbors and protest en masse, with even local government pushing back as well.

But that wonderful exception to America’s descent into Nazism does not mean the descent hasn’t already happened. The comparison remains too apt, and too important to run from. Because it also is instructive for how we got here. After all, how could it have happened here, in a country strong enough to have defeated the actual German Nazis, with its nearly 250-year old constitutional order that should have prevented everything that is now happening. But the answer is revealing: because neither regime committed their crimes with any legitimacy. In both cases, the sitting governments had to destroy the law that would have restricted their evil in order to perpetuate it.

Of course, even if the Weimar Republic had been too weak to resist it, surely America should have been more durable and able to resist such a threat emerging from within. Yet here we find ourselves, which itself adds to the list of reasons why it is so important to realize it: because thinking it can’t happen here is precisely why it has happened here. Saying it can’t and wouldn’t happen here is exactly what ensures that it can and will. It could and it did, because too many ignored one of the critical lessons of the Holocaust, which is that its horrors don’t come from nothing. Yes, there are malevolent people, but they only have power over us when good people do nothing with the power they have to stop it. And here far too many people who should have protected us from what is now happening turned a blind eye to it while it was brewing on the horizon and in doing so cleared the way for it.

As history keeps demonstrating, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Which is why it is so important to stop burying our heads in the sand, or, worse, try to excuse the inexcusable by rationalizing, even if only out of some sense of misplaced patriotic vanity, that what is happening is anything less than what we believed should never be able to happen again. It is only by recognizing that this evil has slipped through our defenses that those defenses can be fortified.

And it is important to start now, because, again, the story of Nazi Germany offers even more important lessons. One is that there will come a tipping point after which it may be impossible to stop the horrors the government is perpetuating without risking war. Furthermore, even if the atrocities the American government is committing were to stop today—and at last there finally seems some political enthusiasm for trying to get them stopped—hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people have already been traumatized, tortured, or killed by these monsters we allowed to run around among us for the last year wearing our flag. There is no undo button for what has befallen them. But if we act now we can save others. As well as ourselves.

Because one other key lesson is that this evil doesn’t just victimize others; it victimizes everyone. It is not just the targets of the regime but everyone’s welfare that is at stake. The history of the Holocaust shows how ultimately every German suffered along with the people the Nazis specifically targeted. There is no allowing this evil to happen to just some among us. We’re all in this country and world together with our fates inexorably intertwined. These are crimes being committed against all of us, trying to destroy the fabric of our nation, its values, and all the law that is supposed to protect us all. Saving everyone is the only way to save ourselves.

And the first step to salvation is acknowledging the true danger we face.

Note: I originally started writing this post because I thought it had an important point to make. Then I saw the execrable news that the US Holocaust Museum had the gall to criticize the comparisons being drawn between what is unfolding against the vulnerable among us now, and what unfolded decades ago against the vulnerable in Nazi Germany, as if any victims had some sort of a monopoly on sympathy for being victimized, and it only became more relevant. I may not be a Trump sycophant unlawfully operating one of the nation’s most important museums, but I’ve visited enough Holocaust memorials and museums, studied enough Nazi propaganda in academic environments, and toured enough concentration camps to have learned the lessons that curators in every instance have been desperate to teach the future. The US Holocaust Museum board should think about becoming similarly educated so that they, too, can learn that the point of all these efforts archiving and instructing on the past is NOT to take the Nazis’ side.

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