The Swastika
by: Craig Wiesner on October 5th, 2009 | 14 Comments »
As we drove into the parking lot at the high school in Palo Alto Sunday evening, we were greeted by a group of about two dozen protesters, waving American and Israeli flags, and holding signs. One woman moved her sign so that I could see it clearly as I drove past her… “If you hate America so much, why don’t you just leave?” Further down the line a man pushed his sign towards my window emblazoned with the horrific symbol of Nazi Germany, the Swastika.
What was the message these people were trying to send? Were they calling me, a Jewish-American decorated military veteran, a Nazi? Were they trying to “purify” the country by convincing people like me to leave? Was this man carrying the swastika because he hated Jews? Or was he trying to say that by driving into this high school parking lot to hear Noam Chomsky speak, that I, somehow, was a Nazi?
One of my most vivid childhood memories is watching films that came out of Germany after the holocaust, images of Jews being shot, their limp bodies falling into giant ditches, with German soldiers standing in a line, some laughing, as another group of Jews lined up, bent down, and awaited the last sound they would ever hear. As children we were fed a diet of nightmares, Jews being stuffed into ovens, ashes and bones later being cleaned out from those ovens by living Jewish skeletons, waiting their turns in the fire. The faces of old women, tiny children, men whose ages you couldn’t guess, naked – gaunt – starved – hollow – the living dead, that were “lucky enough” to be liberated, were poured into our frightened childhood hearts, imprinted on our souls, with the message repeated over and over….. “never again.”
Do today’s right-wing and left-wing activists have any clue what the swastika really means? “Tea-baggers” hold signs showing President Obama sporting a Hitler mustache, with swastikas above, below, on the left and right…. why, because Obama wants to reform health care? How dare they compare Obama to Hitler? Six million Jews were slaughtered by white, nationalistic, Christians who drank Hitler’s Kool-Aid, poured out by a propaganda machine that blamed all of Germany’s woes on Jews. Hitler’s final solution envisioned the eradication of all Jews from the planet. And, if Japan hadn’t attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, do you really think America would have entered WWII to save the Jews? Remember, friends, that even after the liberation of the death camps, when everyone KNEW what had happened, Jews still had a hard time immigrating to the West.
To my friends on the left and those with whom I disagree on the right, don’t you dare wave the Nazi swastika in my face. Don’t you dare compare Noam Chomsky, George Bush, President Obama, or ME to Hitler. Stop it.
Call me naive, a leftist, a socialist, stupid, arrogant, a liberal, silly….. Call John Boehner mean, arrogant, stupid…. Call Nancy Pelosi whatever you’d like…… but stop using the blood and ashes of millions of Jews slaughtered in WWII, and the potential of the tens of millions of Jews who NEVER got a chance to be born because of that crime against humanity, stop using one of the greatest tragedies of history to advance your political position.
Waving the swastika in my face is disgusting. It makes YOU look ignorant, hateful, dangerous, and sick. Stop it. Enough.
Oh…. and by the way….. I thought Chomsky was fascinating.
A very good article,indeed.Touching, thoughtful and profound.And above all,you are rational and witty,Craig.
(I’ve admired – and learned from – Chomsky for 40 years now.)
Powerful and deadly accurate comments about the insulting absurdity of such comparisons. I think of Godwin’s law…
You might add “wrong” to your list the ways people waving swastikas look.
I thank you for your comments. I recently took my 16 year old to hear several young Jewish people talk about their perceptions of how the holocaust has informed government actions in their homeland. They were students who resisted the draft and were jailed and one had a a very public trial. They were beautiful, eloquent and hopeful as only the young can often be. for my son who had just been studying the holocaust in school, it made his history lessons have meaning and depth. As we left, we thought out loud, how do we help people understand that they are loved?
Thank you Craig for reminding us about not only past horrows, but current atrocities.
Thank you Craig for your great insight. Oh, and by-the-way, I love Chomsky too.
Thank you for reminding us of the horror associated with that symbol. For similar reasons, I found it tragically ironic that Israeli Jews would use the Star of David to mark the businesses of Palestinians that they had successfully intimidated into closing or run out of the neighborhood in places like Hebron.
Thanks for sharing this Craig…I was surprised to read of this protest and the strange and conflicting messages. WWII accounts haunt me as well.
Dear Craig,
Interesting protest just last week to Chomsky. I didn’t hear about it in Oakland. It is disgusting and, as a child of Holocaust survivor, I can attest to outright disgust. But as a student of symbols, it is understandable. For the remainder of this civilization, many thousands of years hopefully, Nazi will be the most available symbol of extreme deviation. If all you have to do is put your palm up and yell Zieg Heil to shock the hell out of everyone, people will do it. If on the other hand, we go around Zieg Heiling that won’t work but obviously we don’t want to do that either. On the other hand, can you appreciate why some people get upset at Chomsky? I find his analysis brilliant but only locally. Strategically, he fails because he doesn’t compare analysis, within the context of history and culture. Since he is so in favor of genetic structures linguistically it bleeds into his political analysis and makes him unsympathic to nurture and liberal evolution, not revolution. Hence, he does end up siding with the radicals, which — while obviously not Nazi — does oppose those who defeated Nazism, which was in large the Americans, as messed up, racist and prejuidiced as some of those boys who went ashore on D-Day were. Pacifism in my mind is a rational balance of reality not extremist. I also made a film about the Holocaust, see http://www.ourholocaustvacation.com, where we accepted a lot and saw the nurture process towards human redemption.
It is amazing that by perpetuating memory, we propel prejudices and fears into the future. The fears created by those memories are in many ways as bad, because those fears lead to more bad.
This concept is one of the essential ideas of St. Augustine. That there is no force of evil in opposition to the good. There is only fear in the minds and hearts of mankind, which results in perpetration of evil. It results purely from a condition of consciousness, and choices about our thoughts and habits of mind, and through our own power.
The propaganda machine to perpetuate fear is at work today in the US too, speaking of influences on habits of mind. And this time so far, the targets where there has already been spontaneous violence are illegal immigrants and gays. They serve to deflect from the real culprits fleecing us, spending all our money, causing our problems. We see how easy it is for the disconnected and uneducated amongst us and those frozen out of power over their own lives to fall for these lies.
Someone reminded me recently that there were up to 7M people in this country in the 1930s who were members of Fascist or Right-wing movements. We know of plenty of high ranking Americans and Brits of aristocratic or industrialist lineage who agreed with the Nationalists in Europe, since these movements are good for God, King and Country. Of course how can I leave out, Military Industrial Complex, which in certain nations maybe like our own is equivalent to Country.
They went underground after the disaster of Hitler and Mussolini to their cause, but their children and grand-children still live here. Would their antagonism to progressive, liberal causes, or maybe even the State and the Democracy itself have disappeared? With their own family memory and fear passed down of what Democracy did to their material hegemony from the labor movement, onwards to civil rights, anti-war, and Green environmentalism finally signed into law by a chastised Nixon they probably put into office? Some scholars of history even say emancipation from the ‘peculiar institution’ is still a bee in their bonnet. I am not making this up!
By now, they’re reeling their heads again, which is reflected in the shrill voices against Chomsky, and picket signs Craig saw in Palo Alto. Their members have used their money for 30 years to distort our national values in the minds of millions of our best and brightest who have been through our college and university economics departments and graduate schools of management and business. They are now firmly in control of our mass-media, who freely fill the heads of many with fear, scapegoating, disinformation, and invective against anyone who can be a symbol, or whose message actually may touch too close a chord like Mr. Chomsky.
As much as we complain about what we see, and criticize the people on the sidewalk in Palo Alto, we do nothing to change the substance of the laws that enable them to spew hate into the minds of those susceptible to fear, increasingly economically disenfranchised and desperate, or even unsuspecting with victim consciousness which is quite common in America today all around. For many in the US today,. the world has become a Hobbesian “state-of-nature” just like the one the NAZIs explicitly imposed in their occupied countries, to get just the same fear reaction and readiness to do evil from the average occupied person.
Now that we know how this machine works, as it is happening in our own midst with our own complicity in it since we allow it to continue, we can’t be so high-minded about the past, and the choices of ordinary Germans or other Europeans occupied by Fascist politicians and military industrialists who used mass-media to serve their own ends.
The violence against minority groups could erupt right here, while we debate about the awful significance of the past, and criticizing the mere pawns in the present, totally missing the lessons of history.
I am perfectly happy to invoke terms like Nationalism, National Socialism, or other kinds of Fascism in comparison to what I see happening around here. We have to call it the way it is, or face the consequences.
About 40M died in WWII! Terrible crimes against humanity. And the tools of the military industrial trade are much worse today than they were then. A trade we have also supported with our money and legislators with abandon.
An interesting, emotional post, Mr. Wiesner. Indeed, you should be upset, and all of us should be vigilant to condemn such equivocation.
I also respond to Mr. Browning’s and Brett’s comments. The marshalling of the magen David as a marker of tribal victory is a troubling bastardization of a symbol that is meant to promote harmonious reconciliation. We should be as incensed by this misuse (and misunderstanding) as we are by the nasty ignorance of the indignant protestors Mr. Weisner describes. I would add, though, that this use of the magen David is not an Israeli use, but rather the ignorant action of a subset of the Israeli population.
And Brett’s brief survey of the human tendency to nationalism (tribalism) is poignant. “Never again,” we say…again and again and again. Still, we can press onward against these dark currents.
Thank you Craig. It is ignorance that fosters hate and these folks are clearly ignorant of history and of what is really going on in this country. And some members of the media are fanning the flames. Shades of history repeating itself. We cannot let that happen
It’s a tough place to be, the reasoned center. One tends to catch flack from all sides there.
Police states are just that, no more no less. What language and customs are bent to their purpose don’t much change the result.
Rabbi Mike’s patient, tolerant logic isn’t for the faint of heart. Calm and courage are always in short supply when shouting and threats start.
All those boys who fought and died in Europe to combat fascism should not have given their only lives in vain. There is monumental strength in diversity and tolerance. But it will take perseverance to realize that strength.
What’s interesting to me is that it’s the RIGHT who are waving the swastikas and comparing Obama to Hitler, when they supported a President who invaded two other countries, tortured some prisoners and killed others, razed a city almost to the ground in a modern day Guernica (Fallujah), gutted our Constitution, and militarized our police (although that’s been going on for some time). Some people compare the 9/11 attacks to the Reichstag Fire. Their talk show hosts spread racism and nationalism, and are apologists for torture and war. They argue that the working class (including illegal immigrants) who actually create most of the wealth by actually producing things and doing the work, often in horrid but profitable working conditions, are a bunch of bums looking for a handout. Is this a weird situation or what?
I would just comment that while I agree with you for the most part, the comparison of ANY of the Bushes to Hitler is apt and appropriate BECAUSE Hitler was financed through a Bush family financial company (Brown Brothers Harriman) whose Union banking Corporation was actually prosecuted in 1941-2 and its assets seized for being a Nazi front under the “Tading with the Enemies Act”.
Hitler’s entire war machine and the death camps were financed, and the Bush’s political careers were built on and from, the Nazi whirlwind of destruction and death and murder.
So, at least with respect to the Bushes, I respectfully disagree that we should not make the analogy and that, at least in this instance, Godwin’s “law” is not correct.
The Nazis regrouped after WWII and their trademark swastika was abandoned, but in many ways it seems to have morphed or transmogrified into a “W”.