Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Triggered

I had a visceral response to a black and white photograph someone posted on Facebook today. It showed a group of women lined up in a field, naked. Some of them were holding small children in their arms. The person who posted the picture explained that the photo was taken in Nazi Germany before the Nazis figured out the "final solution", that the women were Jewish, and that they were waiting their turn to be shot one by one and then buried in a shallow mass grave.

The poster wondered what the women were thinking and feeling as they waited to die. Were they afraid? Were they focused on soothing their frightened children? She also asked why their killers insisted that they strip naked: why that final humiliation? They were all just everyday women, with the thighs and tummies and breasts that everyday women have, and quite likely also the sense of modesty and vulnerability in nakedness that everyday women feel. It was that vulnerability that I had the visceral response to, as well as the knowledge of what would happen next, not only to them but to millions of others.

I wondered what their killers felt. Was it glee and exhilaration? Horror? Numbness? Hate? Did they feel like bigger men, having been empowered to kill?

The person who posted the photo did so in response to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

It wasn't an over-reaction.

A woman, Heather Heyer, was killed at that rally, run over by a white supremacist. A rabbi waited in his synagogue with his congregation while heavily armed people with Nazi flags marched past chanting "no more Jews" and wondered what he could possibly do if one of these submachine-gun-toting fanatics burst through his doors. A disabled person in a wheelchair was doused with gasoline and threatened with an open flame. A UVA professor had a stroke while defending someone who was being beaten, and later died.

Anyone who marches with a Nazi flag, knowing what it stands for, voluntarily aligns himself with the murderous regime that decreed the death of those defenseless naked women. Anyone who knowingly aligns himself with that regime loses their right to be considered human, never mind the First Amendment. Anyone who aids, abets, and encourages them is in the same category. Not human, not animal (because no animal would do such a thing to their own kind), not vegetable, not mineral. A category all their own: evil.

The Charlottesville marchers are finding out that actions have consequences: they are being outed on Twitter one by one. Some are losing their jobs; others, who were violent, are finding out that there are arrest warrants waiting for them. One was even disowned by his own father. A part of me feels that it is good for them to experience the persecution they wish to inflict on others; another part of me wonders whether they'll become any less hateful and violent if they are shunned, unemployed or in jail. I somehow doubt it.

I have no answers, but I do know who unleashed this. Every thinking person does. Conditions may have been ripe, just as they were in Germany in the 1930s, but nothing happens until there is a Fuhrer to give his assent, and the assent has been given. It is now up to those who think and know and have the power to act to stop the madness.

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