All This Has Happened Before and Is Happening Again: 1933 and 2023

An antisemitic mob in Philadelphia is the stuff of nightmares.

To bear in mind constantly that all of this has happened before. And will happen again—the same plot from beginning to end, the identical staging. Produce them in your mind, as you know them from experience or from history… All just the same. Only the people different. --Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

On Sunday night, an antisemitic mob, shouting to the beat of drums, showed up at a Jewish-owned falafel store in Philadelphia. The mob marched at the Goldie's location chanting: “Goldie, Goldie you can't hide, we charge you with genocide.” Goldie’s is a chain “owned by Mike Solomonov, an Israeli-born, Pittsburgh raised chef who has won the James Beard Award in the past.” Solomonov’s brother was killed by a terrorist in 2003.

If you don’t want to be haunted, don’t watch the mob rhythmically chanting their hate or the larger mob parading through Philadelphia calling for genocide against Jews.

After Hitler came to power in 1933, “he told his cabinet on March 29 that he had personally called on the Nazi Party to organize a boycott of the Jews, particularly their businesses.” In his book The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Thomas Childers explains that Hitler’s plans were soon implemented:

On the morning of April 1, the boycott went forward as planned. Storm Troopers stationed themselves in front of Jewish shops, department stores, and professional offices, menacing anyone who wanted to go inside. They carried anti-Semitic placards and scrawled slogans on Jewish shop windows: “Germans, defend yourselves. Don’t buy from Jews.” Goebbels, an enthusiastic promoter of the boycott, launched a propaganda barrage aimed at “enlightening” the public about world Jewry’s “declaration of economic warfare” against Germany. “The boycott against the world atrocity propaganda has broken out in full force in Berlin and across the entire Reich,” Goebbels enthused in his diary notes. To see for himself, he drove down Tauentzienstrasse, a fashionable street with many Jewish businesses. “All the Jewish shops are closed,” he beamed. “SA guards stand before the entries. Everywhere the public has declared its solidarity [with us]. Exemplary discipline dominates.”

In his book Hitler's True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis  Robert Gellately explores how antisemitism infected the minds of German youth from the top down:

The diary of Hitler Youth member Franz Albrecht Schall conveys a sense of how antisemitism permeated the ranks… Living in Dresden and still in school, he wrote almost nothing about any hatred toward the Jews until March 29, 1933, when he noted that in a few days his group would begin “the boycott campaign against the world-enemy and parasites: Jews. You’ll get to know us! Decades long you’ve sprinkled your poison in the people, decades long you’ve drowned a once clean land with kitsch, filth, and smut; you’ve captured the people’s property shamelessly and brutally and filled your pockets from big businesses and trusts! The anger of the people will make you small again, the way you came at the beginning, over in Poland and Galicia!” Here was self-encouragement worthy of a hard-bitten member of one of the death squads that later roamed across Eastern Europe. Two days after this entry, he excitedly scratched in his diary that he was reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and though he was still at the Vienna days of the future dictator, Schall wrote that he had the same problems and thoughts. Was that what he really thought, or was such exaggerated pride expected within his circle of comrades?

How many members of the Philadelphia mob had their minds infected on college campuses by professors hostile to Western civilization? Nevertheless, hate can only take root in a mind receptive to hate.

In an upcoming three-part essay, I will consider the chilling memoirs of Sebastian Haffner. In his book Defying Hitler: A Memoir, Haffner writes of such “educational campaigns”:

At the same time [as the boycott] a great “education campaign” against the Jews was set in motion. The Germans were informed through pamphlets, posters, and meetings that it had been a mistake to consider the Jews as human beings. In reality they were a kind of “subhuman” animal, but with the characteristics of a devil. The consequences that would be drawn from this were not spelled out for the moment. Still, the campaign slogan was given out as “Juda verrecke” (Perish Judah).

Those who joined the mob at Goldie’s likely see themselves as righteous. Famed psychologist Roy Baumeister, in his book Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty writes, “Many violent people believe that their actions were justified by the offensive acts of the person who became their victim.”

What may come next? In the introduction to Hannah Arendt’s seminal book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, the Nazis, Amos Elon writes, “had succeeded in turning the legal order on its head, making the wrong and the malevolent the foundation of a new ‘righteousness.’” With enough propaganda, “civil norms” can be redefined and “decent instincts” inherent in people are “no longer to be taken for granted.”

The media has lied to us about who the real Nazis are. They are the children of “respectable” parents who never paid any attention to their children’s miseducation or neglected to teach their children moral values.

A baying mob ecstatic in its hate is a scene out of Nazi Germany or theocratic Iran. Nothing good can follow. If a generation or two, educated in hate, spreads its poison, America may be unrecognizable.

Aurelius wrote his Meditations in the hope he would learn from his mistakes. Today, not many show signs of his willingness. There are Nazis among us, who have not yet learned history’s lessons or the principles by which humanity flourishes, and they are growing in numbers.

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