Trump and Lynching: An Historical Comparative Analysis

 
By Steven Jonas

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President . . . is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or anyone else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about anyone else."

                                    Theodore Roosevelt, Editorial in The Kansas City Star May 7, 1918

 
At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC is an extensive collection of photos from the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz. The photos show these extermination camp guards "on break," in 1944 at the height of the camp's mass murdering campaign, having picnic lunches, engaging in choral singing, playing with their dogs, gathering for smiling group photos, and smoking cigarettes. (This was so even though at Hitler's behest in the 1930's, the Nazis had instituted the world's first comprehensive anti-smoking campaign, in Germany. And there you thought that all German armed forces members always followed orders.) They even decorated Christmas trees (after all, the slogan "Gott mit Uns" was on their belt buckles). And all this time, thousands of Jews and other nationalities were being gassed and burned at the camp every day. Talk about the banality of evil.  

Among the reactions to the contents of the exhibit was expressed by The New York Times columnist Roger Cohen ("Down Time from Murder," NYT, 9-24-07): how could those Germans go about their daily lives and laugh on breaks and retreats? Oh those "just awful" Germans. "How unique they were." Oh really?

Funny, but I was reminded of the set of photographs taken over many decades, some of which were actually made into picture postcards sent through the US mails, of public lynchings in the U.S. South. (You can see an extensive collection of them here.) People, other than the victims, laughing, smiling, kids playing, (no link necessary for this one) having lunch, and acting as if a lynching was a celebratory spectacle. How could that happen? And how indeed, only the Germans did that later on during the Holocaust. And then I also thought of those smiling photos of the guards at Abu Ghraib, Iraq. Just ordinary folks, having fun while brutalizing Iraqi prisoners. And then, we have the reports of the for-fun shootings of Iraqi civilians by Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq and the ongoing horror of Guantanamo. 

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Source: OpEdNews