Welcome to the backdrop of my life. My dad was a Holocaust survivor from Poland who managed to escape from his town's ghetto before it was emptied and his family was killed. He rarely missed an opportunity to express his hatred for FDR though I learned from Burns' film that the reality was quite a bit more complicated. He died this past June having told my children and me stories of all he experienced and always warned it could happen here. The silver lining around his death was that as early dementia set in during his last year he was unable to process the level of anti-semitism and anti-immigrant feeling that we now see. It was amusing though to try to convince him that yes, Dad, the president of Ukraine is really Jewish.
Charlie rightly focuses on the massive moral failures surrounding the Holocaust. Perhaps an equally hard lesson to learn, in the sense of looking in the mirror, is that FDR's political realism about the nature of the American people was absolutely necessary. This would also seem to hold lessons for our time. We need desperately to put together a lasting coalition to defeat Trumpism. This means that compromise is the order of the day within that coalition. Joe Manchin and Bernie Sanders make strange bedfellows. But this is what we need.
I have urged people to watch the Burns documentary and I continue to feel that the first half of the first chapter is where our interest should be focused with a laser stare and it documents how easily Hitler rose to power, going from a 3% recognition of his political party to being the bigget party in Germany in three years. It's just appalling.
Think Trump. Think MAGA
Beyond that , we have our first bought off judge that operates publicly and brazenly.
The chances that Clarence Thomas' wife and former clerk devised the fake electors scheme without his participation in some form or fashion are vanishingly small.
If I may continue my rant against Jeane Kirkpatrick from yesterday. Reliving any sordid chapter in American history is the sort of "blame America" critique she used on the left in the 1980s. The glorifying of Kirkpatrick makes my point about historic revisionism some Bulwarkians like to engage in about the good old days when conservatives (like Jeane Kirkpatrick) were nothing like Trumpians of today. Her attacks on the left (never mind her defense of authoritarian regimes that rivals Trumps) was unhealthy for the Republic and embolden others to demonize their fellow Americans.
In fact, the "American First" isolationists in the 1930s are but one in a long line of the "Paranoid" part of the conservative movement that has always existed. It is the herpes of the conservative movement in the US that has festered since the 19th Century.
I confess I suffer from battered liberal syndrome (apologies to those impacted by real acts of violence) in that I've sustain decades of abuse from conservatives for my supposed communists, anti-constitutional, blah, blah, blah positions, while watching them defended or minimize the behavior of the Jesse Helms', Pat Bucanhan's, or Sarah Palin's of the world. So, while I'm a huge consumer of Bulwark content--as it reflects my need to hear honest and unvarnished opinions--I just can't let the occasional quip about "the good old days of conservatism" go unchallenged. While I appreciate the essence of conservatism--traditions and social order--there is little good to say about the behavior of the conservative movement in my life time. Like I said, I enjoy unvarnished opinions.
They don't care how history will remember them as long as they are able to enjoy the fruits of power today.
It has long been argued that those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it.
There was not a single historical fact or story in the Ken Burns documentary that was not already known and much of it taught in schools and colleges for decades. The power of the program is bringing the facts together in a coherent narrative. It brought it all into focus.
What did I learn from this program?
Those who DO study history are DOOMED TO REPEAT IT ANYWAY.
MAGA is just the same old garden variety nativism repackaged and repurposed for another generation but with each iteration it seems to grow in power and now has the opportunity to metastasize through social media. How different American political history in the 20th century would have been had The John Birch Society had access to Facebook and Twitter in the 1950s and 60s.
Christian Nationalism has given form to a most peculiar anti-semitism: simultaneously Loving Israel but hating Jews as Jews.
That timeline should be on the front page of EVERY newspaper in the country. Trump is a seditious, traitorous, son of a - there is no animal lower than Donald J. Trump. And yet, we still get, "oh, he just got a big ego, he doesn't understand, etc." DAMN IT! HE KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT HE'S DOING! And everyone who abets, coddles, excuses, helps him is the equivalent of the SS, Stasi, Prada, KGB, etc. And I'm including every columnist, newspaper, TV personality, politician, etc. in the country.
As for those damn election deniers, either they're liars for spouting that garbage, or they should all be in mental institutions for believing that ANYONE could fake ballots throughout the entire country in hundreds of voting districts, etc. on the scale they believe happened.
This is why history classes matter, and this is why cuts to Humanities programs and courses are far more than just a budgetary decision and efforts to maximize revenue streams. As human beings we need to understand where we come from and how events of the past shape both our understanding of ourselves in the present and how we look at each other, and the world, around us.
Human lives are not products of borders and birthrights. They are grounded in fundamental wants and needs that we all feel and share as part of the human condition. Accordingly times of tragedy, and individual attempts to mitigate their impact, should be understood based on empathy far more than politics. I always am saddened and stunned when people brush off immigrants, those who live in poverty, and others in challenging circumstances as being somehow less human and less important than the rest of us who take so much of what we have for granted -- the product of seldom if ever having to experience real hardship. Truly unless you have walked a mile in the shoes of those who are desperate to flee political repression and persecution, starvation, and other life-altering circumstances, you really don't understand why people are compelled to resort to escape in an effort to survive. If by the grace of God we do not have to endure such suffering, the least we can do is inform ourselves and educate each other about it across history and societies, and try to understand why others who are not nearly so fortunate as we are see things very differently than we do.
If we value human life more than money, our approach to the immigration issue should reflect it. And if we value money more than human life, we should be prepared to be treated as lesser life forms if someday we are in extreme hardship and others with more material wealth than we have, and less sensitivity, pass arbitrary judgment on us. Either way, let's educate ourselves first and understand the human condition better with those Humanities offerings that constantly are on the chopping block. Their value and worth are far greater than the price tag that we put on them.
I'll never forget the way I learned about the Holocaust. It was in 1958. In those days, Denver was a very segregatated city: Italians and other "semi-white" ethnics in North Denver; the lower class whites and "Mexicans" in West Denver; the white middle class/upper working class in South Denver; and the white upper class and the "rich Jews" (even if they weren't) in East Denver. And then, one day, a building started going up on a bluff just south of the "border" between east and south Denver, on the "south side". It was soon known it was a synagogue. My friends and other people and me too called it "Kike's Peak," and nobody thought anything of what we were saying. We heard the adults say it, so it must be OK, right?
That summer, I went to Church Camp. I belonged to a "liberal" Congregationalist church. The second day we were there, our minister introduced us to a visitor who had a story to tell us. It was the rabbi of that synagogue!
He told us a story of being a secular Jew (a term he explained) who had gone in the Army, where he and other "honorary white people for the duration" (Jews, Italians, Irish, Poles, etc) were commissioned and put in command of "those people" (the nonwhites). He ended up in the famous 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the Japanese-American unit. Eventually, they liberated Dachau. He then pulled out a shoebox full of little 2x2 Kodak Brownie prints. He told us these were pictures of Dachau he had taken on Liberation Day, and he began passing them around. These were not the "censored" photos most of us have seen. By the time the first photos had made their way around the circle, kids were gasping and crying to look at what was there to be seen. And then he told us how, after being there, he returned home and "became a Jew." And a rabbi. He chose as his mission to "take the story to the Gentiles."
Every time I think about it, that day is like yesterday in my memory.
Clarence and Ginni Thomas are perfect examples of why people who develop huge chips on their shoulders - and can never get over it - should never be entrusted with power.
America has a wonderous, terrible, enlightened, and depraved history. But the history taught in the average HS classroom is one that has been sanitized and had the discomforting parts of our history mostly removed (especially recently in Red states). And that is a shame, because it is only in learning about our worse mistakes can we truly become our best
What the US did during the Holocaust period was awful, as was the later internment of Japanese immigrants and their children after Pearl Harbor. The creation of the state of Israel in what had been British Palestine was the WWII victors' way of trying to atone in part for what had happened to the Jewish people of Europe. "Never again!"
It is one of history's ironies that Israel has long been building walls along its border to keep out Palestinians, who were driven off their land by the new Israeli state.
As a Jewish woman whose grandfather emigrated to US in 1912 when he was 11 I forced myself to watch the Burns program. As much as I had already known about the Holocaust and how the US and denied entry of those who were fleeing unspeakable horrors it still is so heart breaking to learn even more details. I have been to the US Holocaust museum, the Museum of The Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the LA Holocaust Museum and the Ann Frank House in Amsterdam and still there are things I didn’t know. While I am glad by my accident of birth to be born in the US I am appalled by the way we treated the indigenous Indians, the internment of Japanese Americans, how we have marginalized black Americans and other minorities and the continuing xenophobic behavior today of people fleeing horrific dangerous countries. Unfortunately I have a pessimistic view of our current civilization. There just aren’t enough people who see beyond the end of their own noses and as such we are barreling towards unthinkable consequences.
Charlie, SO HAPPY you featured the Burns documentary! As a teen in Milwaukee in the 70s, I met a survivor of the St Louis, thus learned of a shameful event not covered in my US History class. We must know & understand our history—the bad and the good—so we can recognize, as you say, that we’ve been here before and do better. Thank you! (& Mona too!)
Makes you wonder if we, as US citizens are really that exceptional, or if we have ever been. We have the capacity, and the system in place to be exceptional, but if we don't learn from our shortcomings, we'll never be more than average.
Welcome to the backdrop of my life. My dad was a Holocaust survivor from Poland who managed to escape from his town's ghetto before it was emptied and his family was killed. He rarely missed an opportunity to express his hatred for FDR though I learned from Burns' film that the reality was quite a bit more complicated. He died this past June having told my children and me stories of all he experienced and always warned it could happen here. The silver lining around his death was that as early dementia set in during his last year he was unable to process the level of anti-semitism and anti-immigrant feeling that we now see. It was amusing though to try to convince him that yes, Dad, the president of Ukraine is really Jewish.
Charlie rightly focuses on the massive moral failures surrounding the Holocaust. Perhaps an equally hard lesson to learn, in the sense of looking in the mirror, is that FDR's political realism about the nature of the American people was absolutely necessary. This would also seem to hold lessons for our time. We need desperately to put together a lasting coalition to defeat Trumpism. This means that compromise is the order of the day within that coalition. Joe Manchin and Bernie Sanders make strange bedfellows. But this is what we need.
I have urged people to watch the Burns documentary and I continue to feel that the first half of the first chapter is where our interest should be focused with a laser stare and it documents how easily Hitler rose to power, going from a 3% recognition of his political party to being the bigget party in Germany in three years. It's just appalling.
Think Trump. Think MAGA
Beyond that , we have our first bought off judge that operates publicly and brazenly.
The chances that Clarence Thomas' wife and former clerk devised the fake electors scheme without his participation in some form or fashion are vanishingly small.
If I may continue my rant against Jeane Kirkpatrick from yesterday. Reliving any sordid chapter in American history is the sort of "blame America" critique she used on the left in the 1980s. The glorifying of Kirkpatrick makes my point about historic revisionism some Bulwarkians like to engage in about the good old days when conservatives (like Jeane Kirkpatrick) were nothing like Trumpians of today. Her attacks on the left (never mind her defense of authoritarian regimes that rivals Trumps) was unhealthy for the Republic and embolden others to demonize their fellow Americans.
In fact, the "American First" isolationists in the 1930s are but one in a long line of the "Paranoid" part of the conservative movement that has always existed. It is the herpes of the conservative movement in the US that has festered since the 19th Century.
I confess I suffer from battered liberal syndrome (apologies to those impacted by real acts of violence) in that I've sustain decades of abuse from conservatives for my supposed communists, anti-constitutional, blah, blah, blah positions, while watching them defended or minimize the behavior of the Jesse Helms', Pat Bucanhan's, or Sarah Palin's of the world. So, while I'm a huge consumer of Bulwark content--as it reflects my need to hear honest and unvarnished opinions--I just can't let the occasional quip about "the good old days of conservatism" go unchallenged. While I appreciate the essence of conservatism--traditions and social order--there is little good to say about the behavior of the conservative movement in my life time. Like I said, I enjoy unvarnished opinions.
"And how will history remember them?"
History is written by the winners.
They don't care how history will remember them as long as they are able to enjoy the fruits of power today.
It has long been argued that those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it.
There was not a single historical fact or story in the Ken Burns documentary that was not already known and much of it taught in schools and colleges for decades. The power of the program is bringing the facts together in a coherent narrative. It brought it all into focus.
What did I learn from this program?
Those who DO study history are DOOMED TO REPEAT IT ANYWAY.
MAGA is just the same old garden variety nativism repackaged and repurposed for another generation but with each iteration it seems to grow in power and now has the opportunity to metastasize through social media. How different American political history in the 20th century would have been had The John Birch Society had access to Facebook and Twitter in the 1950s and 60s.
Christian Nationalism has given form to a most peculiar anti-semitism: simultaneously Loving Israel but hating Jews as Jews.
That timeline should be on the front page of EVERY newspaper in the country. Trump is a seditious, traitorous, son of a - there is no animal lower than Donald J. Trump. And yet, we still get, "oh, he just got a big ego, he doesn't understand, etc." DAMN IT! HE KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT HE'S DOING! And everyone who abets, coddles, excuses, helps him is the equivalent of the SS, Stasi, Prada, KGB, etc. And I'm including every columnist, newspaper, TV personality, politician, etc. in the country.
As for those damn election deniers, either they're liars for spouting that garbage, or they should all be in mental institutions for believing that ANYONE could fake ballots throughout the entire country in hundreds of voting districts, etc. on the scale they believe happened.
Yeah, I'm angry!!!!
This is why history classes matter, and this is why cuts to Humanities programs and courses are far more than just a budgetary decision and efforts to maximize revenue streams. As human beings we need to understand where we come from and how events of the past shape both our understanding of ourselves in the present and how we look at each other, and the world, around us.
Human lives are not products of borders and birthrights. They are grounded in fundamental wants and needs that we all feel and share as part of the human condition. Accordingly times of tragedy, and individual attempts to mitigate their impact, should be understood based on empathy far more than politics. I always am saddened and stunned when people brush off immigrants, those who live in poverty, and others in challenging circumstances as being somehow less human and less important than the rest of us who take so much of what we have for granted -- the product of seldom if ever having to experience real hardship. Truly unless you have walked a mile in the shoes of those who are desperate to flee political repression and persecution, starvation, and other life-altering circumstances, you really don't understand why people are compelled to resort to escape in an effort to survive. If by the grace of God we do not have to endure such suffering, the least we can do is inform ourselves and educate each other about it across history and societies, and try to understand why others who are not nearly so fortunate as we are see things very differently than we do.
If we value human life more than money, our approach to the immigration issue should reflect it. And if we value money more than human life, we should be prepared to be treated as lesser life forms if someday we are in extreme hardship and others with more material wealth than we have, and less sensitivity, pass arbitrary judgment on us. Either way, let's educate ourselves first and understand the human condition better with those Humanities offerings that constantly are on the chopping block. Their value and worth are far greater than the price tag that we put on them.
Why don’t we ask our Afghan allies how much we’ve changed since those dark days before WWII?
Tens of thousands of the remain stuck in Afghanistan despite waiting for years for their visas to be processed.
Ukrainian refugees get royal treatment but men and women who fought our enemies are left behind.
I'll never forget the way I learned about the Holocaust. It was in 1958. In those days, Denver was a very segregatated city: Italians and other "semi-white" ethnics in North Denver; the lower class whites and "Mexicans" in West Denver; the white middle class/upper working class in South Denver; and the white upper class and the "rich Jews" (even if they weren't) in East Denver. And then, one day, a building started going up on a bluff just south of the "border" between east and south Denver, on the "south side". It was soon known it was a synagogue. My friends and other people and me too called it "Kike's Peak," and nobody thought anything of what we were saying. We heard the adults say it, so it must be OK, right?
That summer, I went to Church Camp. I belonged to a "liberal" Congregationalist church. The second day we were there, our minister introduced us to a visitor who had a story to tell us. It was the rabbi of that synagogue!
He told us a story of being a secular Jew (a term he explained) who had gone in the Army, where he and other "honorary white people for the duration" (Jews, Italians, Irish, Poles, etc) were commissioned and put in command of "those people" (the nonwhites). He ended up in the famous 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the Japanese-American unit. Eventually, they liberated Dachau. He then pulled out a shoebox full of little 2x2 Kodak Brownie prints. He told us these were pictures of Dachau he had taken on Liberation Day, and he began passing them around. These were not the "censored" photos most of us have seen. By the time the first photos had made their way around the circle, kids were gasping and crying to look at what was there to be seen. And then he told us how, after being there, he returned home and "became a Jew." And a rabbi. He chose as his mission to "take the story to the Gentiles."
Every time I think about it, that day is like yesterday in my memory.
And nobody ever said "Kike's Peak" again.
Clarence and Ginni Thomas are perfect examples of why people who develop huge chips on their shoulders - and can never get over it - should never be entrusted with power.
America has a wonderous, terrible, enlightened, and depraved history. But the history taught in the average HS classroom is one that has been sanitized and had the discomforting parts of our history mostly removed (especially recently in Red states). And that is a shame, because it is only in learning about our worse mistakes can we truly become our best
What the US did during the Holocaust period was awful, as was the later internment of Japanese immigrants and their children after Pearl Harbor. The creation of the state of Israel in what had been British Palestine was the WWII victors' way of trying to atone in part for what had happened to the Jewish people of Europe. "Never again!"
It is one of history's ironies that Israel has long been building walls along its border to keep out Palestinians, who were driven off their land by the new Israeli state.
I guess "never again" only applies to Israelis.
As a Jewish woman whose grandfather emigrated to US in 1912 when he was 11 I forced myself to watch the Burns program. As much as I had already known about the Holocaust and how the US and denied entry of those who were fleeing unspeakable horrors it still is so heart breaking to learn even more details. I have been to the US Holocaust museum, the Museum of The Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the LA Holocaust Museum and the Ann Frank House in Amsterdam and still there are things I didn’t know. While I am glad by my accident of birth to be born in the US I am appalled by the way we treated the indigenous Indians, the internment of Japanese Americans, how we have marginalized black Americans and other minorities and the continuing xenophobic behavior today of people fleeing horrific dangerous countries. Unfortunately I have a pessimistic view of our current civilization. There just aren’t enough people who see beyond the end of their own noses and as such we are barreling towards unthinkable consequences.
Charlie, SO HAPPY you featured the Burns documentary! As a teen in Milwaukee in the 70s, I met a survivor of the St Louis, thus learned of a shameful event not covered in my US History class. We must know & understand our history—the bad and the good—so we can recognize, as you say, that we’ve been here before and do better. Thank you! (& Mona too!)
Makes you wonder if we, as US citizens are really that exceptional, or if we have ever been. We have the capacity, and the system in place to be exceptional, but if we don't learn from our shortcomings, we'll never be more than average.