The US and the Holocaust is an upsetting must see for different reasons than The Woman King is now my number one movie and a must see as well.
The connections to the white supremacists of today is undeniable. They even had an "America First" movement back then. Three prominent white women’s groups were early in the isolationist movements campaigning against early efforts for Jews to immigrate and find refuge here. At that time in Europe, they were being disappeared and shot in the middle of remote forests and started fleeing local terror from their neighbors and locals emboldened by the rhetoric of the leaders. Sound familiar?
We may know of the murder camps run by the Nazis, as some still deny this and the real conditions of African enslavement. The Nazi soldiers were so proud of their work, they filmed and photographed it before even formalizing their death campaign. It is one thing to find something horrific and unbelievable, and quite another to deny it happened at all. It reminds me of those white supremacists today who say enslavement was a genteel labor system. It happened to Black people here, why wouldn’t happen to Jews in Europe? It may express itself differently, but the heart seems to be the same to The savagery of Western culture is well documented throughout written history if one is willing to see it as more than episodic.
I consider myself someone who has read and seen all I can about the Jewish Holocaust, as one of the speakers in the documentary said, quoting a survivor he interviewed, “there is no bottom of what human beings will do to one another”. I would say, “human beings disconnected from their own humanity”. One of the Nazis even said as much juxtaposing when they are doing it for the reasons they did. I won’t be quoting any Nazis in this blog. The lengths they went to cover up their crimes, burning bodies and grinding their bones to dust, then killing those captives they made to do the work. *Wow* The machine-like nature of this recorded horror is just overwhelming.
The most challenging part of watching these stories is how it leaves out the context of what was done to people of the African continent brought here as one of the first of these savage moments in “modern” history. It was refreshing to see that while major media outlets were still in disbelief and expressing its disbelief if it was covered at all, the Black publication the Pittsburg Courier among some others ran a front page story about the atrocities. That was probably because those kinds of atrocities were within our frame of reference unfortunately.
Even though Eisenhower made all the troops in the area come to see what the Nazis had done, the norm of shoving things under the rug and not talking about or processing this sort of experience leaves the violence of silence that ails many societies in place. The practiced cognitive dissonance that surviving this system requires, leaves us unable to learn from history that we don’t recount.
A fuller telling of Anne Frank, her father Otto and a fuller telling of a lot of parts of this story is the hallmark in my view. There are so many images I have never seen in this documentary and some I have seen before that I could peacefully avoid. I can say I was devastated again to see the piles of bodies in many of the scenes, but don’t look away. People deny these truths of the oppressed because they don’t want to believe them or cannot, but the sustainability of this planetary existence depends on each of us moving from denial to awareness and commitment to framing a more humane world.
As the filmmakers included toward the end of the third episode, a GI named Joseph A. Wyant writing to his father about the results he witnessed of the Nazi atrocities, “This particular crime has been uncovered Pop, but a worse crime seems to me to be the spreading of the thought that leads to this type of thing. It happened in mass proportions here in Germany, but who knows how far the ideas have spread or where else it may break out? … even more important than the punishment of the criminals here is the stamping out of their philosophy… this is not a war between nations, but humanity’s struggle for the right to exist.”
Although I appreciate the connections presented between the dynamics and propaganda that fuels some of the United Statesians currently. Unfortunately, what always seems left out of the contextual telling of this story is the atrocities endured by Africans in this country hundreds of years before the 1930s and beyond 1945 to today. I imagine this is another reason why the founders of Black Lives Matter so aptly named the movement. Comparison of atrocities or the millions of dead in the body counts is not what is needed, but let us stop telling these stories in isolation so we may treat these issues as the systemic issues they are.
Instead, let us finally realize that some of the ways to stamp out this philosophy is to hold people accountable to the laws that exist, and make new ones for justice instead of cover-up delaying accountability. We also need to examine ourselves, stamping it out in each of our hearts, realizing we have all been taught the same ideas according to our systemic role. We all respond to the ideas differently depending on our positioning (target or beneficiary) and may even feel anxiety for instance, but for different reasons.
I believe the only reason this philosophy persists is that some believe the lies of the zero sum game, don’t benefit from a full telling of history and see themselves as superior or aspiring to join that worldview, all of which are an unsustainable fallacy, besides the violence of authoritarians. Have we learned yet?
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