A History Lesson for Those Who Haven't Spoken Out Against Antisemitism
Why Ordinary People Enable Totalitarians, Part 3
We have been exploring Sebastian Haffner’s extraordinary memoirs in two earlier parts of this series. In Part 1, we learned that until Hitler came to power and enacted measures against Jews, Haffner had been confident that the constraints of German civilization would hold:
We felt more or less sure that [Nazis] would be held in check. We moved among them with the same unconcern with which visitors to a modern cageless zoo walk past the beasts of prey, confident that its ditches and hedges have been carefully calculated. The beasts for their part probably reciprocated this sentiment. With deep hatred they coined the word “system” for the impalpable force that held them within bounds while it left them their freedom. For the moment, at least, they were held within bounds.
Since the October 7th massacre, there are far too many in America and the West who are sitting this one out. Very few of those who are silent are antisemitic. At least, not today. Why do I write today? In Part 2 of this essay, Haffner illustrated how the herd driven by totalitarians works to infect others with its poison.
Today, some are indifferent to what is happening to Jews, thinking it is of no concern to them. Or perhaps, just as during COVID, some are afraid to express their views and hope, despite the evidence, that the crisis will soon pass.
The poison that flows through radical Islam will not ebb soon. And in America, antisemitism is now the norm among the young. A new survey, “conducted THIS WEEK by Harvard-Harris polling, found 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 said they believed the long-term answer to the Israel-Palestinian conflict was for ‘Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.’”
If, by your actions, you are indifferent to Jews and Israel, I appeal to your self-interest. You are making a foolish bet if you are counting on today’s totalitarian youth and their cowardly enablers to stop with Jews after they are in power.
In Part 2, we explored the mind trick that the Nazis used not only against the Jews but against other nations and groups. The Nazis turned their hate around by provoking conversations, not about their hate, but about the “Jewish question.” Haffner wrote, “By publicly threatening a person, an ethnic group, a nation, or a region with death and destruction, they provoke a general discussion not about their own existence, but about the right of their victims to exist.”
Does this sound familiar? It should. After spending years calling everyone Nazis, Jew-haters today have adopted Hitler’s playbook. Beware, the Jews are the canaries in the coal mine.
Clifford Porter (MD, PhD), responding to Part 2 of this series, is sure you can’t ignore this battle for civilization. He writes:
Sebastian Haffner's Defying Hitler is one of the best insights into the totalitarian tolerance and psychology. The individual was lost to the ideologies of race. Morality was then suspended in the minds of the true believers, then ordinary people as well… People who say do not bring up Nazism when discussing current events are very wrong; we should study it and understand why the most educated society fell into the most barbaric.
Because so many are standing down, I continue with Haffner’s memoirs in Part 3 of this essay series.
Shortly after Hitler came to power, Haffner, a lawyer in training, saw what was happening in the courts:
You had to choose your words with care and conceal your thoughts to avoid going to the concentration camp instead of the Ministry of Justice. Confident and proud though the conversations in the court corridors were, they were hampered by an undertow of fear and mistrust. The opinions that were expressed sounded a bit like exam responses learned by rote. Quite often the speaker broke off suddenly, and looked around to see if someone had perhaps misinterpreted his words.
Soon, he was being advised that standing down was not enough; one must “howl with the wolves” to stay safe:
One day — I do not remember what heresy I had just uttered — one of my co-Referendars (lawyer in training) took me aside, looked closely into my eyes, and said, “A word of warning, colleague. I have your best interests at heart.” Another close look. “You’re a republican, aren’t you?” He put a placatory hand on my arm. “Shh. Don’t worry. I am one too at heart. But you must be more careful. Don’t underestimate the fascists.” (He used the word “fascists.”) “Skeptical comments are no use nowadays. You’re only digging your own grave. Don’t fancy that there’s anything to be done against the fascists now! Certainly not by open opposition, believe me! I think I know the fascists better than you. We republicans must howl with the wolves.” That was the voice of the republicans.
Today, if you speak against DEI initiatives, the corruption of BLM, woke school curriculums, or the radical trans agenda, a colleague might advise you to “howl with the wolves.”
As Bari Weiss recently explained, DEI “is about arrogating power.” The movement that has claimed this power “demonizes hard work, merit, family…the dignity of the individual” and “seeks to undermine what makes America exceptional.” Truth doesn’t matter, DEI doctrines matter. If you think this movement will leave you alone, ask those who lived through Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, or Mao’s China for a second opinion. Speaking for the Jews today is paying it forward for yourself tomorrow.
College presidents unwilling to condemn calls for genocide against Jews have sickened many. The rot starts earlier: “From pre-K lessons on ‘ethnic noses’ to lectures on Israel as an apartheid state, students are learning that Jews are the enemy.” Our children are being brainwashed to hate Jews, to hate America, and to question their biological sex; and most Americans are staying silent.
In Germany, society's fundamental basis, the rule of law, was corrupted in just one quick step:
The new Prussian regional interior minister (a Nazi: a certain Captain Göring) promulgated an incredible decree. It ordered the police to intervene in any brawl on the side of the Nazis, without investigating the rights and wrongs of the matter, and furthermore to shoot at the other side without prior warning. A little later an “auxiliary police force” was formed from the ranks of the SA.
Without the rule of law, the German government made it "legal" to dismiss Jews. They fired “Jewish civil servants, doctors, lawyers, and journalists… but now it happened legally and in an orderly fashion, citing paragraph such-and-such of the Civil Code.” If you think today’s law students value the rule of law, you are not paying attention.
Today, “the Biden administration was consulting with violent antisemites on the best ways to counter antisemitism.”
Like college administrators today, Haffner reported, judges understood they were answering now to a “higher” authority: “The judges, who could be ousted at a moment’s notice, were told that their powers had been immeasurably increased. They had become ‘people’s judges,’ ‘sovereign judges.’ They need no longer anxiously follow the letter of the law. Indeed, it was better if they did not.”
New unqualified judges (like DEI hires today) were appointed who “gave eloquent speeches, in a somewhat overloud voice, stating that here the paragraphs of the law must yield precedence; he would then instruct his co-judges that the meaning was more important than the letter of the law.” Haffner continued:
[The unqualified judge] would quote Hitler. Then, with the gesture of a romantic stage hero, he would insist on some untenable decision. It was piteous to observe the faces of the old Kammergerichtsrats as this went on. They looked at their notes with an expression of indescribable dejection, while their fingers nervously twisted a paper clip or a piece of blotting paper. They were used to failing candidates for the Assessor examination for spouting the kind of nonsense that was now being presented as the pinnacle of wisdom; but now this nonsense was backed by the full power of the state, by the threat of dismissal for lack of national reliability, loss of livelihood, the concentration camp.”
For a while, non-Jews could pretend all was well: “All this was still something one only read about in the press. You did not see or hear anything that was any different from what had gone on before. There were brown SA uniforms on the streets, demonstrations, shouts of “Heil,” but otherwise it was ‘business as usual.’”
Today, our lives may seem ordinary, but don’t be deceived. Haffner writes, “Daily life also made it difficult to see the situation clearly. Life went on as before, though it had now definitely become ghostly and unreal, and was daily mocked by the events that served as its background.”
In Germany, life continued, but as Haffner writes, “it was no longer possible to deny that daily life itself had become hollow and mechanical. Every minute merely confirmed the victory of the enemy forces flooding in from all sides.”
Those not haunted by the decline of the West are not paying attention or denying reality.
Even if I am wrong, you have nothing to lose by speaking from your deepest humanity. If I am correct, speak now before the enemies of civilization have you in their crosshairs.
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Living through covid was dystopian. The silencing. The necessity that everyone think the same. The lawn signs. In the real depths of covid- spring 2020- every print ad was paid for by the government, every radio jingle was government sponsored, euphemistic slogans were everywhere. Liberties were curtailed. The spirit of neighbors turning each other in became real to me. I had never been able to imagine it before. People felt that escaping covid was more important than attending religious services, than visiting dying relatives, than properly burying and mourning loved ones, than allowing young people to get married. More important than a woman not laboring alone, laboring without a mask constricting her breath, not having her newborn yanked out of her arms.
Religious and moral beliefs were overturned and disappeared like Sodom and Gemorah. But no one looked back at the destruction. Everyone just pretended that these new values were no break from the Western or monotheistic values humans had lived by for our collective lifetimes.
The worst and most surprising part was that the decision to mourn a loved one at an outdoor funeral was not a personal weighing of risk; it was considered a government decision, and the most dystopian part was that it was one likely to be enforced by some bitter or grumpy person bringing enforcement in.
We now see at the angry ignorant and violent pro Palestinian protests that the dehumanization that mask wearing brings is essential to the new norm of lawlessness, of justifiable violence, of silencing opposition by any means necessary.
I see it too. It breaks my heart.
Thank you for your work Barry. Please keep up the fight.
You, all of yours, and all of your readers are in my prayers now.
Merry CHRISTmas and/or Happy Holidays!