Okay, two weeks of Trump and I’m a week behind on the outrages. Well, get used to it, because it won’t get any better. Last week, when Donald Trump was proving to the world that he hates foreigners, he was also proving to the world that he thinks Jews talk too much. It’s always about them, you know! Talk, talk, talk! Yes, Hitler murdered six million Jews! We all have problems!
In more measured form, Trump’s recent statement, issued with regard to International Holocaust Remembrance Day, made no mention of the fact that Nazi Germany uniquely targeted Europe’s Jews for extinction, blaming “world Jewry” as the source of all of Germany’s “suffering”, which was in fact entirely due the German nation’s lust for power and domination.
The omission was atrocious in itself, and then was infinitely compounded by the Trump Administration’s refusal to offer any explanation or apology for the omission, making it clear that Trump and his inner cohort explicitly adhere to some crank-brained form of angry and vicious self-pity that pictures white Christians as the oppressed of the earth, a pack of lies being sold aggressively in Europe and being championed by, of course, everyone’s favorite muscle boy, Vladimir Putin.
It’s certainly true that the Nazis showered inhuman abuse on literally hundreds of millions of Slavs, Poles, and Russians, murdering millions and planning to murder millions more and to enslave the rest, scientifically recreating life in America’s antebellum South. Yet nothing remotely equals the obsessive horror unleashed by the Nazis against the Jews, who often suffered hideously from the Poles, the Russians, and other Eastern Slavs as well. But, somehow, that didn’t count. Not to Trump, anyway.
Afterwords
Hitler’s first attempt at population elimination was in fact directed at Germans. He wanted to remove the unfit—the mentally and physically disabled and the terminally ill—all those who took from the Reich instead of giving to it. He was stopped (stopped, after tens of thousands had died), largely due to opposition initiated by Protestant clergymen and the German Catholic Church.1 Unfortunately, the German clergy were not so sensitive to the sufferings of non-Germans.
