Is the U.S. Repeating its Mistakes from the Holocaust?
Rarely in our lives do we get such a profound sense that we are living through history and have a chance to do something about it. Thanks to Ken Burns’ new documentary U.S. and the Holocaust, along with Charlie Sykes’ commentary on the documentary and its stark parallels to our current moment, it is impossible not to feel this is a historic time.
Sykes traces all the ways Burns’ documentary shows how America and Americans failed the Jews during the Holocaust. There were regular fear-mongering occurrences like Father Charles Coughlin’s radio show, which “rallied opposition to helping Jews escape Hitler with a mixture of anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories, and rants against globalism.” And there was the St. Louis, a ship filled to the brim with 900 Jews that had been promised asylum and safety in Cuba, but when the boat arrived, the Cubans backed out of the deal. The passengers reached out to President Roosevelt requesting a temporary stay, but their request was ignored, and the ship had to return to Europe. And while the people on the St. Louis did find temporary safety in Europe, nearly 250 were killed when Germany invaded those countries.
In his newsletter, Sykes next shows how the rhetoric and conspiracy theories used to vilify Jews during WWII are now used to talk of immigrants from Mexico and other South American countries. What seems so striking in both Burns’ telling of how the U.S. acted during the Holocaust and how Americans are performing today is Christians who willingly deny one of the foundational truths that all humans deserve dignity because we are all made in the image of God.
In a time when the political party that most closely aligns itself with Christianity is the party that elects candidate after candidate who demonizes immigrants as rapists and illiterate gang-bangers, it cannot help but feel like this is a historical moment. Now is the time for those of us who profess Christ to say, whatever our politics, that we will not stand for the denigration of people made in the image of God. Especially when those people, like the Jews in WWII, are often seeking to escape some personal or political terror in their home countries.
This is not a call for some specific solution to the genuine problems at our nation’s border, but it is a reminder that if we do not learn from our history, we will be doomed to repeat it. And as Sykes asks, is anyone who was involved in turning away the St. Louis proud of their work? We could ask the same of those currently using immigrants — image bearers — as political props. Now is the time to say enough is enough, that whatever solution we come to regarding immigration, it will not come at the cost of the dignity of people who, but for the grace of God, could be us.
3 More Things
1) Rolling Stone has a wild profile of Lance Wallnau, the millionaire “Christian Nationalist prophet” who is palling around with Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania. Wallnau, who runs Lance Wallnau Ministries after failing to grow a megachurch, is a leading figure in the New Apostolic Reformation movement. Rolling Stone does an excellent job of showing the rotten fruit of Wallnau and those he associates with in their attempts to grasp at political power for the sake of America and Christianity.
2) We missed this clip from CBS News’ Face the Nation last week, but it is a must-see. A University of Chicago professor who studies political violence talked about what he is seeing now on the right, and his findings are chilling. This quote especially: “Today, there are millions of individuals who don’t just think the election was stolen in 2020; they support violence to restore Donald Trump to the White House. In fact, just over the weekend, that is just a few days ago, we conducted our most recent nationally representative survey. Today, there are 13 million individuals, the equivalent, I should say, of 13 million individuals who support the use of force to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.”
3) We have shared before in this newsletter how the folks behind Truth Social view QAnon believers as the specific market for their new social media platform. Now Vice reports that “Truth” Social is showing ads targeting QAnon believers. For a glimpse of where this could end up, Vice notes, “The promotion of QAnon by Trump and Truth Social has coincided with an uptick in QAnon-linked violence in recent weeks. Last month, an armed man dressed as a clown, who had posted QAnon videos on Facebook, entered a Dairy Queen and threatened to “kill all Democrats.” Days earlier, a QAnon believer in Michigan shot and killed his wife.”