Consequences

How Germany and America Differ

I told someone yesterday that the consequence of repeating 1940s Germany in a much larger, much harsher country, among a much more callous and cruel population of people, is the national response to concentration camps won’t just be ignorance and silent complicity, but enthusiastic support.

Germany’s national conscience kicked in after global powers held them accountable. They then engaged in serious self-reflection. This is something I don’t see possible for the US and it terrifies me.

I grew up Christian. WECs and WCs, in particular, can excuse any instance or pattern of bigotry and violence in the name of God. Already, the predominant white Christian response to mass deportations is “They shouldn’t have broken the law.” As if law breaking makes someone’s humanity null and void. An interesting take from people who profess to believe in a Jesus who picked grain on the Sabbath and was crucified for treason against Rome.

But that’s not my main point. Let’s ignore the hypocrisy of American WCs and look at the potential consequences of an Americanized holocaust, replete with military backing, Republican support, Democratic complicity, billionaire funding, and citizen apathy.

The reflection Germany engaged in is impossible under these circumstances. Americans don’t reflect. They bury and deny and double down.

The global allies willing to stand against fascism would have a difficult time curtailing the actions of such a large and powerful country like ours.

But most of all, there are millions upon millions of people here who, in full knowledge of the torture and death of migrants and immigrants, would happily cheer such a “cleansing.” This isn’t Hitler and his select party members—this is the majority of a huge, powerful country’s inhabitants who have already dehumanized and left these men, women, and children for dead.

The fact that the minute Guantanamo Bay was mentioned the country didn’t revolt is a great indicator of how this is going to go.

If you can get people to believe criminals deserve anything and everything, no matter how cruel and inhumane, and then you can convince them that your enemies (as well as the people you hate because they are poor or speak a different language or aren’t white) are criminals, you have carte blanche to do whatever you want to them and no one will say a damn thing.

And when people point out, “Hey, this is a genocide, this is a concentration camp, this is an evil to the likes of which we haven’t seen in a long, long time”, everyone will go, “Why does it matter? If they didn’t want to be horrifically tortured and killed, they shouldn’t have broken the law.”

It starts with immigrants, migrants, refugees. That should be enough for people to riot. But it won’t.

It will escalate to trans people, protestors, journalists, and “enemies of the state.” That should be enough for people to stop it. But it won’t.

It will end with the poor, the homeless, the non-white, non-billionaire, non-powerful, the disabled, the women, the children. And by that time, no one will be left to care.

The apocalypse was never going to be like Left Behind. It was always going to be ushered in by the cruelty and evil of Christofascism.

When the world is a shell of what it was, when this country is powered by the bodies of all those “criminals” labeled such by monsters and opportunists, what will happen next?

I don’t know if we’ll be around to see it, but I hope it backfires spectacularly.