And Then The Murders Began

People tend to think of the Holocaust as an event, or a constant:  Hitler came to power, next stop Auschwitz.   This is far from historical fact, however. The Holocaust was a process, with a beginning, a middle and, if not an end, then at least a near-culmination. There was an arc that took European societies from accepting Jews as neighbors, fellow citizens and even prominent members of the community — if with a dogwhistle here and there, and occasional down-home Jew-hating talk — to wholesale slaughter, with a side serving of unbridled abuse, rape, torture and gleeful psychological sadism.  It didn’t happen overnight.

The proto-Nazis spent the 1920’s spreading vicious, (literally) cartoonish anti-Semitic propaganda.  Those were the Der Stürmer years. Relentlessly, the future “winners” of the German state called Jews animals, vermin, criminals, racial degenerates, ideological enemies of society.  The first race laws began to be enacted in 1933. Then, in 1935, Jews, Roma and other “undesirables” were stripped of their citizenship and civil rights.  Then came the pogroms. Then came the ghettos.  And then the murders began. Sporadic mass executions were followed by systematic, mechanized slaughter of human beings throughout Nazi-occupied Europe.

Uber Hate

My family came to the United States during the early 1990’s recession.  My father had been a railroad engineer back in Russia, mostly working the geriatric section of the network, the track between Moscow and (then) Leningrad.  In the States, he discovered to his chagrin that the railroads and the train industry were in the crapper, and so the only job he could find that matched his education and skills was for a custom air-conditioning company, which offered him $8.25 an hour with no benefits — provided he first worked for them for six months without pay, “as a volunteer”.  And so, like many youngish Soviet immigrants at that time, my father became a livery driver.

Some More Things To Think About This Election Season: The “Empathy For The Trump Voter” Edition

With only a couple of days to go before the election, I look back on this unspeakably hideous political season, and I realize its main theme in public discourse (other than that email nonsense) was how badly progressives like me fail to understand/appreciate/love the Trump voter.  In spite of copious coverage, people who are voting Trump are deemed forgotten and ignored by the elitist media.  And so in the spirit of the times, I’d like to add the following three items to this election’s installment of Six Things I Want Every Politically Opinionated Person To Take To Heart:

Some Of The More Absurd Things A Lot Of “Smart” People Believe

I am continuing my list of remarkably inane things people say remarkably often. (Previous installments: here, here and here.) Today’s theme is smart people’s stupidity. Intellectuals can sure embrace some bizarre ideas, and through processes I can’t even begin to understand, some of those ideas enter mainstream smart people’s thought. Ideas like:

Justice? What Justice?

There is more bad news out of Ferguson, because everything is horrible. Prosecutor Robert McCulloch, of Darren Wilson grand jury fame, unable to restrain himself from telling those who don’t believe cops should be killing people in the street willy-nilly what to do to their own orifices, gave an interview during which he nonchalantly admitted to suborning perjury during the aforementioned grand jury proceedings. Naturally, this led to some excitement in the normal-people world, as in: is it possible something could be salvaged out of the whole Ferguson mess in the name of justice? As a pessimist with a lot of experience in the legal field, I have to answer that question as “no, probably not.” McCulloch wouldn’t be gloating about all the false testimony he deliberately introduced if he was in any danger of incurring penalties.

Trayvon Martin Was A Floozie

I haven’t commented on the George Zimmerman verdict, because there isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said by others more eloquently than I ever could. So not to beat a dead horse, I just want to briefly point out a detail that I haven’t seen discussed, but that I find very curious: the standard justifications that “impartial” people offer for killing Trayvon Martin are eerily similar to the arguments the same kind of people usually offer in defense of rape. Nay, they aren’t similar, they are exactly the same.