I was going to take today off from writing. Some days the rage that has been driving me is overwhelmed with grief, bewilderment, incomprehension, and deep sadness, and it's hard to write coherently in a fog of confusion and weepiness. I was aiming to spend a bit more time outside in the sunny-with-cloudy-periods instead of continuing to read "news" articles because, well, some days it's really hard. Easier to write when I'm just angry.
But this makes me angry -- headlines on CNN that decry the bombing of an ambulance convoy in Gaza by Israel. The article briefly mentions Israel's "claim" that Hamas terrorists were using the ambulances to ferry themselves and their weapons out of Israel's range, but most of the article is about the high death toll in Gaza (numbers provided by Hamas), and the people suffering because they are running out of supplies and fuel, and the bloody devastation of the bombing of the ambulances (brief mention that no medical personnel were hurt; no mention of who the dead bodies strewn about belonged to). Here's the similar headline from Politico, and the one from The Washington Post. Israel, on the other hand, has provided evidence that Hamas is stock-piling supplies and fuel, has a main operation center hiding under the hospital, and is using its ambulances to transport terrorists and weapons. Israel has also provided evidence that when it opened up a humanitarian corridor today for more people to evacuate from northern Gaza to the south, Hamas fired on the convoy of Palestinians trying to leave. And evidence that they found supplies for Hamas -- oxygenators for their underground tunnel system -- being ferried in by the humanitarian aid trucks from Egypt. But the headlines are all "Israel strikes ambulance near Gaza hospital."
Once again though the anger turns to an inexpressible sadness, deep and hollow. I look around the whole world and there is just so much blind hatred. They say that history is important because if we don't learn from it we're doomed to repeat it. What if we did learn from it and people want to repeat it anyway?
I've been thinking a lot about the Holocaust. I had a wonderful professor at Queen's University named Gerry Tulchinsky (z''l - may his memory be a blessing) who forced himself to teach a course on the Holocaust every 2 years. He told me it took a year to recover from it each time, or else he would have taught it annually. He taught it in the auditorium because it was the largest venue on campus at the time, and the course was always full. He would be up on the stage talking methodically through the various historical threads involved; the propaganda; the politics; the planning. And then he'd start to choke up, and he'd have to pause for a few minutes to pull himself back together and be able to continue lecturing. It wasn't actually his field -- he was an historian of Canada, specializing in Jewish immigration. But he taught himself everything he could about the Holocaust so that he could teach a course on it, because no one else at Queen's was teaching about it and he thought it was vital that someone did. Because if we don't learn from history, we're doomed to repeat it.
On November 9, 1938, the Nazi party's paramilitary wing, along with the Hitler Youth organization and some German civilians, destroyed and ransacked Jewish homes, hospitals, businesses, and schools throughout Germany and Austria. By the time this "Night of Broken Glass" or Kristallnacht was over, 267 synagogues and over 7000 Jewish-owned businesses were destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and deported to concentration camps. Unknown numbers of Jews were beaten, burned, or killed. But this wasn't the beginning of the Nazi oppression of the Jews -- the anti-Jewish laws had been enacted back in 1933. It was just the beginning of the time during which no nation on earth could claim to not know exactly what was going on, because Kristallnacht was the most widely reported event in real-time that the world had seen up to that point.
And yet, the British Daily Express headline read "Looting Mobs Defy Goebbels” and the article described how German leaders were trying to stop the brutality of the anti-Jewish violence. The paper assured its readers that the Nazis were the good guys. The Daily Express was owned by Lord Max Beaverbrook, a powerful British imperialist who believed in white racial superiority at the top of a hierarchy that had Jews at the bottom with Blacks. He also owned Britain's Sunday Express and Evening Standard.
Back in January 1934, as Jews were being removed from public life in Germany and the Nazi party were already running a large network of concentration camps across the country, Lord Harold Rothermere, owner of Britain's Daily Mail, praised Hitler while assuring his readers that the stories they might be hearing of atrocities against Jews were exaggerated. Later the same year, Rothermere explained to his readers, in an article in his newspaper, that the Nazis needed to control the "alien elements and Israelites of international attachments who were insinuating themselves into the German state."
It wasn't any better in the US. Along with Rothermere and Beaverbrook, Robert McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune, William Randolph Hearst, owner of more than two dozen newspapers and a syndicate wire service that monopolized American media, and Joseph and Cissy Patterson, who ran the New York Daily News and the Washington-Times Herald, together reached a combined audience of about 65 million daily readers in Britain and the US. Each of these owners paid an average $1,500 (about $20,000 in today's terms) per article that Hitler or other top Nazis wrote for them in order to promote their ideas to a global audience. In so doing, these media moguls helped to construct news that sympathized with fascism and promoted Jew-hatred across the western world. All isolationists who wanted their countries to stay out of any potential war in Europe because of the harm it would do to their businesses, they also put a lot of effort into blaming the Jews for trying to pull the world into another world war. They wrote that the Jews were pushing the world to war so that they could continue to control everything from the media (as much of a bad joke then as it is now) to the world's finances and politics. (If you're interested in all of this, I got this info from this book.)
It's one thing to understand things as an historian, to look at the state of the world in the first half of the 20th century, to rationally analyze all of the different intellectual, social, economic, and political trends that led to the extermination of 6 million Jews and the wilfully-turned blind eyes or full-on cooperation of so many governments and media barons with the Nazis' Final Solution. One can even share -- as Gerry Tulchinsky did -- in the sense of bewilderment and helplessness of the Jews who felt the nooses tightening around them through the 1930s; one can empathize with their own wilful ignorance, their own tolerance of the cold intolerance and even hatred being manifested by their former friends, employers, and neighbors. One can feel the growing sense of terror as they were beaten and shot in the streets, their businesses and livelihoods destroyed, their yellow stars assigned, their children removed from school. And then the absolute horror at being carted off in trains to be sorted, separated from babies and grandparents, and either worked to death or gassed to death for many long years before a small, broken, remnant was liberated. (But with nowhere to go -- some were beaten or shot when they tried to return to reclaim homes that had been taken over by former neighbors. So they lived in Displaced Persons camps, and tried to make their ways to North America, or to Palestine.)
Reviewing that history is hard. But I can make some sense of all of the trends and signs that brought it about and that kept the world from wanting to know what was really going on. Right now though, as "never again" seems to be happening again, I can't make sense of anything. I see the media, governments, massive numbers of citizens of free countries, my own students and colleagues, engaged in full-on support of not only the destruction of the only place to which I can go when the next Holocaust begins; not only justifying the horrific events of October 7 -- or outright denying them; not only ripping down posters of the haunting photos of children and elderly people who have been taken as hostages among the most savage blood-thirsty and hate-filled monsters to have appeared on earth in recent times -- they make the Nazis look at least rational in their orderly extermination of Jews; but completely ignoring -- or celebrating -- the ongoing bombing of Israel by Hamas, Hamas' statements promising more slaughter until every Jew is gone "from the river to the sea," and the thousands of attacks on Jews and on their property occurring throughout the entire free world.
Maybe one day decades from now, if there are any Jews or Jewish allies left anywhere, someone will be curious enough to look back at this chapter in history and try to make sense of how we got here. But right now, not only does the present completely defy my ability to understand anything, but I truly don't know where we go from here. I have learned everything I can from history. But I don't know where I go from here. I just don't.
(P.S. I will very likely take a break from writing tomorrow, I promise!)