On the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

I was unable to visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum during my last trip to D.C. in 2013, and frankly, given the massive lines to get in, I wasn't sure I wanted to; something about seeing so many tourists herding into a genocide exhibit was kinda off-putting to me.  The crowds struck me as less memorializing than voyeuristic, gawking than remembering.  What's more, I began to wonder if our monomaniacal fixation on the Jewish Holocaust was a tad unhealthy--after all, there have been a ton of similarly awful genocides since then (the Ukrainian Holodomor, the Chinese Great Leap Forward, the Cambodian Killing Fields, Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan, etc), causing our sanctimonious calls of "Never Again!" to ring rather hollow, and moreover gives short shrift to all these other victims who are never memorialized in equally grandiose fashion.

Moreover, if I had seen the Holocaust Museum in 2013, I probably would have wondered if it is getting rather counter-productive to constantly villanize a long-defunct, 70-year-old, easy enemy like the Nazis, what with "Nazi" becoming our go-to, watered-down insult for anyone whose political beliefs we don't like, or even just corrects our grammar too much.  Also, the Nazis seem to give the rest of us too much of free pass, for no matter how many civil liberties we violate, countries we invade, people we torture, etc, we can always just point to the age-old Nazis and claim that we're still the good guys compared to them--which is technically correct, but to quote Seneca, bonitas non est pessimis esse meloriem [it is not goodness to be better than the worst].

But I didn't go through the Holocaust Museum in 2013; I went through this last weekend in 2016, where I was swiftly reminded of what dire importance these lessons still are.  For the permanent collection makes no bones about the United States' own enabling role in the Holocaust, when, in the '30s, we refused to raise our stringent immigration quotas enough to allow in Jewish refugees fleeing the Third Reich (go read about the good ship St. Louis being denied safe harbor anywhere in Cuba or the U.S. if you want to feel really depressed today).  Our stinginess basically condemned millions to death because we tacitly agreed with the Germans that no one wants the Jews in their borders, either--and it is difficult to not draw a parallel to the fact that over half of our state governors today have loudly refused to accept Syrian refugees.

In our current election cycle, it is likewise difficult to read the exhibit captions and not draw direct parallels to the rise of a racist demagogue whom neither the left- nor right-wing parties took very seriously until it was too late; who is only granted power by party officials in the secret hopes of better controlling him; who in fact only wins elections with a plurality, no majority; who scapegoats an unpopular religious minority (Muslims, in our case); who openly advocates engaging in mass-reprisals against foreign enemies and other war-crimes; who proposes removing 11 million "undesirables" (Mexicans, in this case) from our borders once and for all--a "final solution," if you will--oh, and whose supporters have shown a predilection for street violence.

I had a Mexican-American student last semester who told me she thought Mr. Trump sounded like Hitler--at the time, my Godwin's Law alert went off in my head, and I said something to the effect of, "Eh, he's certainly a jack-ass, but c'mon, Nazi's a little strong."  But I've lately realized that Mexican-Americans haven't had the luxury to not be prescient, that, encountering so much more open bigotry than us White-Americans, they've been fully aware all along how many racists there really are in America, and how easy it would be to rile them all up around a single demagogue.  I'm starting to think that I--that we all--owe the Mexicans an apology, for treating as a joke that which was never a  laughing matter.

Now, here I must be careful about all these parallels, in part because there is no such thing as direct parallels--the U.S. has a much better system of checks and balances than the Wiemar Republic; our Two-Party system, whatever else its faults, generally prevents pluralities from seizing power; and we are not currently in the midst of a Great Depression and hyper-inflation (thanks Obama...no seriously, thank you Obama).  I'm not saying that Mr. Trump is the second coming of Hitler--just that I want to keep it that way.