Here's my conundrum: How does Dr. Aviva Dautch, the Director and publisher of Jewish Renaissance, the leading Jewish arts magazine in the UK, understand what's happening here from across the Atlantic Ocean when tens of millions of people here who are not MAGA seem not to get it?
Also in the UK, George Orwell -- who has been fucking DEAD for 75 years -- still gets it from the grave: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Meanwhile, what do we have over here? This Newsweek headline from June 8 pretty much sums it up: "75 Democrats Express 'Gratitude' to ICE in Antisemitism Vote Amid LA Riots." Some day in the far future an alien cultural anthropologist examining the ruins of Earth, will turn one of she/he/it's heads toward a colleague and remark, "They had a term for this. They called it 'Stockholm Syndrome.' They just couldn't recognize it when it was happening, apparently."
It's particularly fascinating to find Jewish writers like Jeffrey Salkin just two days ago ("Not Every Struggle Requires a Nazi Metaphor," July 1, 2025) adamantly condemning the use of Nazi and Holocaust "metaphors" from some sort of bizarre moral high horse ridden without the slightest understanding that we are not now creating metaphors but MAKING DIRECT HISTORICAL COMPARISONS.
Here are two of Salkin's dumbest observations:
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani got into trouble because he was trying to explain or neutralize his use of the term “intifada.”
“What I hear in so many is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights,” he said. He then said that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum had used the word “intifada” when translating the Warsaw Uprising into Arabic, as intifada means “struggle.”
The museum was not happy. It called the comparison “outrageous and especially offensive to survivors.”
That’s because there are many Palestinian sympathizers who want to “globalize the intifada.” But no Jew ever wanted to globalize the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
Take that last inane sentence: "No Jew ever wanted to globalize the Warsaw Ghetto upriging."
Hey, dumbfuck: OF COURSE the people involved in organizing and fighting the Warsaw Ghetto uprigins in April - May 1943 wanted to "globalize" their resistance to an ongoing genocide ... and they did.
Far from the popular impression Mr Salkin seems to share that other than in the Warsaw Ghetto Europe's Jews always walked meekly to their deaths, there were uprisings "in five major cities, 45 provincial towns, 5 major concentration and extermination camps, as well as in at least 18 forced labor camps."
In other words, whether the Holocaust Museum is upset with the comparison or not, Zohran Mamdani is far more historically accurate with the comparison than they're ever going to admit.
Then there's this from Mr Salkin:
Critics of the Trump administration have compared U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the Gestapo, or the SS. They have compared immigrant detention centers in Florida to Auschwitz. They have compared President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, and Stephen Miller to Joseph Goebbels. ...
In “Through the Looking-Glass” by Lewis Carroll, Humpty Dumpty says, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
But we are not supposed to be living in that world.
ICE is bad, but it is not the Gestapo or the SS, whose victims had minimal chances of survival.
The immigrant detention centers? Horrible places that should not exist. But Auschwitz? Where 1.3 million people were imprisoned in the most inhumane of conditions, forced into slave labor and where 1.1 million people died?
Trump as Hitler? On the surface, there are some similarities. But their political theories are completely different. Nazism was collectivist; Trump is radically individualistic. Nazism is a sophisticated ideology; Trump has no core beliefs. Hitler and the Nazis worshipped war; Trump seems to have an aversion to military service.
This is, honestly, moronic, but it passes for intellectual heft these days. Aside from the fact that he clearly has ZERO historical idea of what (and when) either the Gestapo or the SS (Allgemaine or Waffen SS -- does he even know the goddamn difference") did, Mr Salkin's poo-pooing of any Auschwitz comparisons is ludicrous.
Auschwitze opened in May 1940, with the first mass killing via Zyklon-B occurring in September 1841 with the deaths of 600 Polish prisoners in September 1941. Of the 1.1 million people who died between September 1941 - January 1945 (when the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau), the greatest death rate occurred during 1944 -- and the period between late April - early July 1944 saw 440,000 Jews die.
These are critical facts because it means that Auschwitz was open for 58 months, but the first mass killings did not take place until it had been in operation for 17 months, that arguably 65% of all the deaths there occurred in the last 12 months, with 40% of all deaths happening during a particularly gruesome two month subset of that final year.
Here's the point: NOBODY looking at Auschwitz in May 1940 when the complex first opened as another concentration camp could or would have predicted at that moment that it would later become the pre-eminent example of an industrialized death camp in human history. Why? Because as far as we know, noting quite like Auschwitz-Birkenau and the associate complex of other death camps that developed after it had ever happened before in world history.
There literally was no precedent. But because of the actual historical existence of Auschwitz et al we know something about the historical mechanisms that lead from concentration camps to death camps, and if we are going to stop "Alligator Alcatraz" from actually turning into "Alligator Auschwitz," then today (twenty-four hours after the first several hundred inmates arrived as I write) is NOT TOO SOON TO START.
Calling this place "Alligator Auschwitz" is NOT A FUCKING METAPHOR, you twit. It is AN HISTORICAL COMPARISON AND POTENTIAL PREDICTION about what could be ... because it has happened before. We use that comparison not to DESCRIBE WHAT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED THERE, but to PREVENT WHAT HISTORY TELLS US MIGHT WELL HAPPEN THERE WITHIN A COUPLE OF YEARS.
And here's the thing: Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, step by step, told everybody on the fucking planet what they intended to do ... just shy of actually saying, "And if we can't exile them all from Europe, will just put them into death factories while harvesting their teeth and clothes." You've probably never struggled through MEIN KAMPF, but I am a World War 2 historian and I've done so several times. And Hitler NEVER leaves us in doubt of his views:
With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and it is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.
We are seeing the fulfillment of the prophecy. The Jews are receiving a penalty that is certainly hard, but more than deserved. World Jewry erred in adding up the forces available to it for this war, and now is gradually experiencing the destruction that it planned for us, and would have carried out without a second thought if it had possessed the ability. It is perishing according its own law: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
Every Jew is our enemy in this historic struggle, regardless of whether he vegetates in a Polish ghetto or carries on his parasitic existence in Berlin or Hamburg or blows the trumpets of war in New York or Washington. All Jews by virtue of their birth and their race are part of an international conspiracy against National Socialist Germany. They want its defeat and annihilation, and do all in their power to bring it about. That they can do nothing inside the Reich is hardly a sign of their loyalty, but rather of the appropriate measures we took against them.
It is important to understand that the Nazis did not hide what they were doing because they believed they were right,
Nor is MAGA hiding what it intends to do, and the comparisons are, honestly, beyond compelling:
Here is what Das Schwarze Korps was popularizing in January 1938, as preserved by the archives of the Jewish Telegraph Agency:
In 20 years Germany will be free of the bulk of its Jewish population, Das Schwarze Korps, organ of Chancellor Hitler’s elite guards, declareds in its current issue in a leading article accusing the Jews of not wanting to emigrate.
“Twenty years ago,” the periodical states, “it would have been considered utopian to dream of forcibly separating the Jews from the spiritual and political life of the nation. It is no chimera that 20 years from now there will also be a separation in space, at least as far as the greater number of Jews here are concerned.”
The organ insists that the Jewish problem is an international one, to be solved not with the cooperation of the Jews, who would attempt to sabotage it, but against the wishes of the Jews.
“The Jews,” the article contends, “do not recognize the existence of a Jewish problem; they do not like it when anyone speaks of it; they know the character of their people, they know that Jews, neither in Poland, Germany, Rumania nor anywhere else suffer from the exceptional treatment accorded them by any public-spirited proscription. Jews do not fear that their brethren in Germany will not earn enough to get along.”
Here's what President Trump recently posted on Truth Social:
What do you propose we do?
ReplyDeleteThe phrase "Alligator Aschwitiz" popped up because of alliteration. The most accurate comparison would be "Alligator Dachau" which was opened in 1933. And it's initial target was not Jews. "Initially the internees were primarily German Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and other political opponents of the Nazi regime. Over time, other groups were also interned at Dachau, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma (Gypsies), gay men, as well as "asocials" and repeat criminal offenders."
ReplyDeletehttps://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/dachau