Tonight is the 81st anniversary of the NAZI pogrom of November 1938 known as Kristallnacht.
9-10 November 1938 | #Kristallnacht – a pogrom against the Jews throughout Nazi Germany. Almost 100 killed, 30,000 men arrested, over 1,000 synagogues burnt, over 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed or damaged: https://t.co/hrrnJUqR3e pic.twitter.com/m9K2AB7Wpu
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) November 9, 2019
In an article on the evening of 11 November, Joseph Goebbels ascribed the events to the "healthy instincts" of the German people: "The German people are anti-Semitic. It has no desire to have its rights restricted or to be provoked in the future by parasites of the Jewish race."
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) November 9, 2019
Only three years after the Kristallnacht the physical extermination of Jews began in Germany & German-occupied European territory – first the murder was perpetrated in the East by shooting of the Einsatzgruppen & later in gas chambers of extermination camps, such as Auschwitz..
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) November 9, 2019
I’m not sure 81 years on what there is left to say. Especially that I didn’t say in a post memorializing this day last year and the year before and the year before that and the year before that… Or in the posts I’ve done on the Red Summer or any other number of atrocities.
Perhaps we just need to pay attention because the revanchist, neo-fascist, and neo-nationalist descendants of the NAZIs and the other fascists that set the conditions for and carried out the atrocities on Kristallnacht and the even worse atrocities during the Holocaust proper still need to be combatted. They need to be exposed whenever possible. Dragged out into the sunlight for all to see and, should it come to it, once again physically combatted until they are defeated on the battlefield as they were during WW II.
Just this past week a neo-NAZI was arrested for trying to blow up a synagogue in Pueblo, Colorado. A young African American man had to stand his ground in Georgia in the face of a racist attack from a now deceased white man.* And we learned that the President and his racist, white supremacist administration have actually separated an additional 1,500 migrant children from their parents and that number may still be an undercount. I’m sure there are more examples of the revanchist, racist, and fascist throughline that runs from Kristallnacht in 1938 to the President, his administration, his surrogates, his supporters, and the tyrants and dictators that he so idealizes with just a few minutes more searching, but I don’t think I need to belabor the point.
Also, the Auschwitz Memorial is trying to get 750,000 followers by the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January 2020. So if you’re on Twitter, give them a follow!
We hope to get 750,000 followers for the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 Jan 2020.
This will not be possible without your support & engagement.
Help us to honor all victims and preserve their memory online. RT & encourage others to follow @AuschwitzMuseum. pic.twitter.com/PDbTvDcOyg
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) August 23, 2019
Open thread.
* I’m actually surprised it has taken this long for a person of color to have to use force/lethal force to defend him or herself from a white racist’s attack. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in the courts, given that Georgia is a stand your ground state, but the person who stood his ground this time is African American. As I’ve written here many times in comments, I expected this to happen. And I expect that once white people realize that the old maxim that “G-d made man, Samuel Colt made all men equal” doesn’t just apply to white people, they’ll freak out. I’m honestly not sure what the nature of that freak out will be. It might be a response similar to that of then Governor Reagan’s to Black Panther’s openly carrying unarmed long guns in the California state capitol building by signing gun control legislation. Or it may be more similar to the Tulsa Race Riot, the Red Summer, and the response to Forest Joe’s slave revolt in the 1820s among others. But if people of color exercise their statutory rights to self defense, and they are both justified in doing so and do so in response to attacks on their persons and property by racist whites, there will be a backlash. And we all need to be prepared for it.
debbie
Kristallnacht is when shit got real, as the kids used to say. There was no more “That was just an isolated incident” or “They can’t mean me” or “This will pass.”
I started following Auschwitz Memorial when you first mentioned it (in the context of that encyclopedia, I think). Very moving.
Omnes Omnibus
It is as worthy of a memorial as the 30th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin War. And given our current circs, probably much more timely.
Adam L Silverman
@debbie: If I’m recalling correctly, they actually have a virtual tour of the memorial and museum you can take on your computer, tablet, and/or smart phone.
debbie
NPR reported this morning about Mexican officials now threatening family separations.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: I was trying to come up with a real good way to combine the two into one post and decided that would just do intellectual harm to both commemorations.
Another Scott
AJC:
Hmm…
Cheers,
Scott.
Lum’s Better Half
Consider checking your arithmetic.
2019-1938=?
debbie
I see that photograph of people being marched to their deaths, and I could still rip my brothers’ throats out for voting for Trump.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Another Scott: So, in Georgia, Stand Your Ground does have a manila envelope test as well.
Mary G
I’ve been following the Memorial, probably due to you, Adam, since they’ve had 300,000 members. They’re up to about 632,000 and took quite a while.
It helps me remember why the resistance to Twitler is so necessary.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: I hadn’t seen the follow up reporting, just the original article I linked to. I expect that their defense will be under Georgia’s stand your ground statute, but I’m not surprised they were charged.
Adam L Silverman
@Lum’s Better Half: Fixed. Thanks for catching that. The calculator isn’t effective if you fat finger the numbers in wrong.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: I am more terse than you, but this is what I put on FB a while ago:
Adam L Silverman
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
https://statelaws.findlaw.com/georgia-law/georgia-self-defense-laws.html
NYCMT
Both of my grandfathers were arrested and sent to Dachau on Kristallnacht. The one my son is named for has his jahrzeit next week.
Tough day.
Another Scott
@Adam L Silverman: I hadn’t heard anything about it either way, and was curious what had happened since the original incident. Thanks.
But no matter how it turns out, it shows how arbitrary these SYG laws are. And arbitrarily enforced public safety laws are bad laws.
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
phdesmond
speaking of museums and such, i wrote a poem about my visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and it got published:
http://washingtonart.com/beltway/desmond.html
HumboldtBlue
Corinthians SC a huge soccer blub in Sao Paolo wore a yellow Star of David on their uniforms this week in remembrance.
The club is community-oriented and supports the rights of minorities across the board. It was formed by railroad workers during a time when soccer in Brazil was decidedly upper class.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: Part of the problem is they aren’t uniform. While almost all of them are modeled after Florida’s Baxley Amendment, which was the first one and actually written by NRA state president and Florida lobbyist supreme Marion Hammer, not State Senator Baxley whose name is on it, they vary from state to state. Most looked at what Hammer had wrought using Baxley as the useless idiot he is and said: “yeah, that’s not going to work for us.” Specifically, most states have much tighter portions of the legislation regarding the procedures for invoking stand your ground as a defense. Florida’s basically allows one to invoke it immediately, which then puts the onus on the police and the state attorneys (what Florida calls district attorneys) to make an affirmative case why the defense doesn’t apply if they want to bring charges. Most other states don’t do it this way. Rather, the onus is on the person invoking the defense. My guesstimate is that Georgia’s version is like this.
All of that aside, we do have excellent empirical evidence from Florida in regard to the racial disparities regarding the successful use of stand your ground as a defense.
Adam L Silverman
@NYCMT: My sincerest condolences.
Chip Daniels
Americans always like to comfort ourselves with the idea that things like Kristallnacht would be a freakish abnormality here, unthinkable.
But not only could it happen here, it already has, many times.
The burning of Tulsa and Rosewood, the ethnic cleansing of the Natives…there have been plenty of times when hated minorities were violently attacked by organized mobs of Americans.
The other important thing is that the vast majority of Germans didn’t actually take part- very few actually smashed windows or set fires.
But the vast majority turned the other way and let it happen. Fascists always rely on those people.
phdesmond
how long does it take for a posted message to show up?
phdesmond
i’ll be darned! that one showed up right away.
unfortunately, my first post never showed up. in it i mentioned that i have a poem on the web about the DC Holocaust museum.
http://washingtonart.com/beltway/desmond.html
Adam L Silverman
@phdesmond: @phdesmond: Normally it doesn’t, but in this case WP decided your comment belonged in SPAM. I’ve freed it.
Another Scott
@phdesmond: Your first post as a new commenter (or under a new ‘nym) has to be approved. After that, it’s quick.
Welcome aboard.
Cheers,
Scott.
phdesmond
@Adam L Silverman:
i see! thanks for freeing it, adam!
phdesmond
@Another Scott:
thanks, scott!
Mike in NC
Fascism in Europe started 100 years ago in the chaos that followed WW1. Everything old is new again. We have our very own Mango Mussolini to contend with.
dmbeaster
@Adam L Silverman: There is allegedly video surveillance inside the Waffle House of the events.
Another Scott
BBC: Jay0117 explores ‘whiteness’ (10:33 – with subtitles).
Very interesting.
Cheers,
Scott.
Dan B
@Another Scott: This is horrible news. Apologies for anyone living in the deep south but I lived in Jim Crow Arkansas as a child and have no desire to ever go there. My in laws have offered for my partner and I to stsy at their house in the low country of Georgia and we didn’t even thank them for the offer. But then again there are many parts of WA state that are white supremacist havens.
Adam L Silverman
@phdesmond: You’re welcome. Congratulations on publishing your poem.
Bill Arnold
Off topic, finding this an interesting framework. Cross-disciplinary, political science and information security.
Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy (Henry Farrell, Bruce Schneier, October 2018) (direct pdf link)
Adam L Silverman
@dmbeaster: Okay.
Mary G
Things done changed. Congressional candidate speaks at “National Redress of Grievances” rally advertised to bring 100,000 “patriots” for the Second Amendment draws 50 people.
Note: I took out hashtags for Moms Demand Action & Shannon Watts hoping to avoid moderation.
phdesmond
phdesmond
@Adam L Silverman:
thank you, adam.
NYCMT
@Adam L Silverman: They both died free and knowing they had grandchildren. The younger of the two abandoned great wealth and certified as a master baker in Zurich, and was drafted, trained as a medic in Biloxi, and landed with the Big Red One with the third wave on Omaha. He died of kidney disease begun in a vicious beating in Dachau. My younger son is named for him. The older re-established himself twice, in London and in New Jersey, and tended fifty thousand chickens in Toms River, plucking eggs with spidery emphysetic fingers at age seventy to pay medical school tuitions to Temple. My older son is named for him, and was brith-milah’ed on the seventy-third anniversary of his great-grandfather’s arrest.
Mike in NC
Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the 1898 Wilmington Massacre, during which gangs of white supremacists led by ex-Confederate soldiers terrorized the local black population of what was then the largest city in North Carolina, murdering between 50 and 300 people. They merely wanted to Make Wilmington Great Again.
phdesmond
@Mike in NC:
i believe economic jealousy of black prosperity on the part of the whites was the cause, as it was in the burning of the tulsa black business district.
ThresherK
@HumboldtBlue: As an American I reserve the right to root for a soccer team in each country, but don’t have one in Brazil.
Now I’m wondering if Corinthians is my style…
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I disagree Adam, The popular history we get of this period is quite skewed; this hyper violent antisemitism wasn’t an invention of the Adolph Hitler or the Nazis in 1933, but a product of the brutality of WWI and specifically egged the German Army’s attempt to blame others for the failure to quickly over run France like they promised in 1914. It was wide spread threw Europe, the Great Depression amplified it and it was Crab Bucket politics at the extreme. What was even more over the top bark raving mad with the Nazis was they knew Germany was starved into surrender by the British blockage in WWI, so the Nazis’ “solution” to this was designate portions of their population like the Jews to be the ones to starve first, instead of oh, not starting a war they knew they were going to lose.
So there is a parallel with the current period, a failing elite looking for a scapegoat to avoid the wrath of the population they lead into disaster so they can do the same dumb idea, one more time.
Yutsano
@phdesmond: The poem is wonderful. Thank you for sharing.
Kattails
Hi Adam, could you please re-link to your published comments about the idea that “if only the Jews had been allowed to keep their guns” they could have successfully resisted the Nazis? I read it through some time ago. Asking because in local news, the NH house is debating a “red flag law” aiming to stop potential mass shooters by letting law enforcement to temporarily confiscate guns if family members have serious concerns about the safety of loved ones…or anyone else. So the NH Firearms Coalition used a banner and signs with Democratic lawmakers faces superimposed on Nazi, Soviet, and Chinese flags in a statehouse protest. The article didn’t discuss the–ahem–logic behind such a connection, focussing more on the reactions against the group & the signs. The article was in Thursday’s paper, and I immediately remembered your take on this. I would like to send it along to a couple of the Democratic lawmakers involved as helpful background. Thanks! Also, want to refresh my memory.
phdesmond
@Yutsano:
yutsano, i’m so glad you liked the poem! thank you.
Another Scott
@Yutsano: +1
Very moving. Thanks very much, ph.
Cheers,
Scott.
phdesmond
@Another Scott: scott, i’m glad you liked it. thanks!
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
Haven’t made it to Germany to see the memorials but I did get a chance to see the Belgium WWII museum about 45 yrs ago. That was a pretty somber day. Don’t know how I’d feel at Auschwitz. Or even the wall in DC.
Added another follower on twitter. 633.3 K now.
cain
I believe we can call them black now instead of african american. Unless you want to include Americans of South African descent. (black twitter said so!)
Jeffro
Per the latter part of Adam’s post: sunlight now, sunlight tomorrow, sunlight forever. If we really believe we can make a better tomorrow, it means that we must, MUST, shine a bright light on the cockroaches whenever and wherever they might be hiding (or even not hiding)
debbie
@Mary G:
They got 100,000 in just the last month. I think they’ll get there.
BQuimby
The Forgotten Mass Destruction Of Jewish Homes During ‘Kristallnacht’
Study and history has focused on Jewish businesses and synagogues, but not on homes. But the harrowing toll of Kristallnacht reached all of Jewish life.’
https://theconversation.com/the-forgotten-mass-destruction-of-jewish-homes-during-kristallnacht-123301
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
Would the fact that there are tens millions of anti-racist allies make a difference? In the above examples there wasn’t a broad national coalition among whites and minority groups as well as a decades long history of a civil society that has emphasized racial equality/justice. None of that’s going to go away overnight.
Related to topic of the post, I was reading an article in the WSJ (yes, I know) about the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It mentioned that a recent poll taken by the German federal government has found that 57% of East Germans think that reunification has not benefitted them, which has likely fueled the rise of the neo-fascist AfD.
It’s scary how so much of what’s been happening in the US is now spreading to other parts of the world. We have to fight this rise of ultranationalism
Omnes Omnibus
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Far-right skinheads were an thing in the former East Germany as far back as the ’90s. Don’t assume that that everything starts here in the US.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’m not. It’s just that the situation in eastern Germany seems to me to resemble the one we’ve had the US for some time. Their racism is manifesting in social status anxiety, which is causing them to vote for fascists. The GOP are practically fascists themselves. The towns in eastern Germany emptied out, just like rural towns in the US have emptied, those smart enough to going to western Germany, just as those in the US have gone to blue states and cities.
I see a lot of parallels. Our particular brand of right–wing politics are being exported to places like Australia as well.
Omnes Omnibus
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Okay, whatever.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Omnes Omnibus:
I mean, I see what you’re saying. Maybe I shouldn’t have said it’s a direct result of what’s happening in the US. But I do see parallels. Maybe all that means is that racism is a universal human phenomenon. Anyway, thank you for your answer
Omnes Omnibus
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: A lot of the vocabulary of the new right in Europe and the US comes from Alain de Benoist. I was looking for a link to an article that I thought I had. I will get the person who sent to to me before to resend it if I can. Anyway, the point is that these groups have been taking their current form since the 1960s and they have been joining with the remnants of old right wing groups like the Birchers in the US and the Poujadistes in France. We are seeing it bear fruit all over.
.
SWMBO
I added one more to their followers.
Ladyraxterinok
@phdesmond:
Most likely true regarding Tulsa Race Massacre.
Area was known as ‘the Black Wall Street.’
After 35 or so blocks were burned/bombed there was a concerted plan on part of some prominent white Tulsa business men to buy up the land cheap and develope!?! it. Some people were able to block that.
Many blacks lived in tents that winter.
John Hope Franklin’s family lived in Tulsa at the time. His dad moved the family away as quickly as possible. Franklin became a famous historian, prof at Duke
Ladyraxterinok
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Don’t forget Luther’s extreme anti-semitism
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Omnes Omnibus:
Thanks for the link. That was an interesting deep dive even if it wasn’t that article you were talking about.
Richard Guhl
My parents were both there when this foretaste of the evil to come took place. They both worked in the American Embassy in Berlin before the war, my mom as a secretary and my dad as an aide to the Naval Attaché.
They saw the destruction the next morning, and they related to me how stunned and horrified they were. They couldn’t fathom the hateful violence that had been unleashed, because Berlin seemed like such a cosmopolitan city.
My mom was evacuated the day after Hitler invaded Poland. My dad was kept on until April 1940.
artem1s
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I’ve always been particularly offended by the neo-revisionist bullshit taught about Hitler’s wonderful economy and how successfully the Nazi’s rebuilt Germany. The Nazi’s stole the assets and labor of the Jews, Communists and other Untermenschen that they seized during the 20’s and 30’s and once they started the ghettos and sending people to the camps. Millions/billions of dollars worth of homes, factories, and assets were seized by the State handed out as political favors to leaders in the party.
The GOP loves market crashes. More opportunity to steal the labor and assets of the 99% – at discount prices. They voted for Trump so they could repeat W’s recession.
StringOnAStick
@artem1s: Disaster Capitalism is the current name for this, but the process obviously isn’t new as you’ve noted.
J R in WV
@Omnes Omnibus:
Right wing crazies have been in the US since before 1860 — authoritarianism appeals to lots of people. I was with 3 friends back in 1970 in USN School at Great Lakes. We were caught by a rain storm north of the base in WI and ran into a book shop — it was a John Birch book shop.
They loved us, we were white short haired males, then I noticed the titles on the shelves — nutso books about Eisenhower the communist… we went back out into the hard rain, wet was better than crazy!