The American Holocaust

A premeditated mass murder of civilians is happening in America. Its victims include the mentally ill, the disabled, the homeless,  infants, children, and minorities. The majority of its victims are Black males.

While some victims of the American Holocaust are killed by civilians claiming self-defense, the majority are killed by deputized law enforcement. There are some prejudiced citizens who conclude that certain people are up to no good. They call the police who shoot to kill first before asking questions. Using color and claim of official right, there are no consequences for their actions.

The Eastern European Nazi driven Holocaust of the 1940’s was based on a racist ideology that regarded Jews as “parasitic vermin” worthy only of eradication. America too has an ideology that some people are burdens on society or allowing them to live creates burdens on society. For Hitler and other leaders of the Nazi movement, there was no human individuality. They believed that membership in the human race was a racially defined collective group.

For the German Nazis, assimilation of a member of one race into another culture or ethnic group was impossible because they believed that original inherited traits could not change. While it classified Jews as the priority “enemy,” the Nazi ideological concept of race targeted other groups for persecution, imprisonment, and annihilation, including Gypsies, people with disabilities, Soviet prisoners of war, and people of African descent. The Nazis identified others as political dissidents, including Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals, who they considered security risks because they consciously opposed the Nazi regime or did not fit into the Nazi’s social norms.

The Nazis believed that the Aryan race was superior and they not only had the right, but the obligation, to subdue and even exterminate inferior ones. Life Is Beautiful is a 1997 Italian movie about a Jewish-Italian book shop owner during WWII. That movie, like The Pianist, touched upon the Jewish community’s disbelief that there was an agenda to exterminate them. Many did not come to believe that until Germany’s attack on Poland.  It was already known in Germany in 1933, with many of Berlin’s Jews seeking to leave Germany.

On May 13, 1939, the German transatlantic liner the St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany, for Havana, Cuba. On the voyage were 938 passengers. The majority had applied for United States visas and had planned to stay in Cuba only until they could enter the United States. The owners of the St. Louis, the Hamburg-Amerika Line, knew even before the ship sailed that its passengers might have trouble disembarking in Cuba.   By the time that the St. Louis sailed, the political conditions in Cuba changed. Cuba allowed only 22 Jews to enter the country.

Is it a surprise that this year, the words St. Louis and the nation of Cuba are heard again?

The sad thing is that the demonstrations and protests against police brutality have rattled the cages of White Supremacists in America who are circulating the idea that it’s a them vs. us situation. They are following the pattern of Hitler’s Nazis.

We see history repeat itself. Can we stop it before it is government sanctioned in every state of America?