Day by day, the regressive Left drags American society closer to violent conflict. First, it was ok to punch fascists, or systematically to infiltrate an opponent’s campaign rallies and instigate conflicts. Now, senior officials in the Trump administration are targeted at their homes, and may not even eat or shop in peace. These examples are at the fringes of political acceptability, and slightly absurd… for now. But there is a cumulative effect, and in all likelihood this will not end well.
More concerning are the now constant invocations of Nazism and Hitler. To take just a recent example, former CIA Director Michael Hayden posted a vile Tweet comparing the immigration control measures at our border to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Alan Dershowitz rightly calls this a form of Holocaust denial. While many on the Left are no doubt well aware of what they are doing, others—certainly many young people—may be ignorant of what it means to invoke terms and imagery from this darkest chapter of human history.
In 1945, at the head of the Allied liberation force, General Dwight Eisenhower entered the Buchenwald concentration camp. He wrote in his diary:
In a shed . . . was a pile of about 40 completely naked human bodies in the last stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly sprinkled with lime, not for the purposes of destroying them, but for the purpose of removing the stench. When the shed was full—I presume its capacity to be about 200, the bodies were taken to a pit a mile from the camp where they were buried. The inmates claimed that 3,000 men, who had been either shot in the head or who had died of starvation, had been so buried since the 1st of January. When we began to approach with our troops, the Germans thought it expedient to remove the evidence of their crime. Therefore, they had some of the slaves exhume the bodies and place them on a mammoth griddle composed of 60-centimeter railway tracks laid on brick foundations. They poured pitch on the bodies and then built a fire of pinewood and coal under them. They were not very successful in their operations because there was a pile of human bones, skulls, charred torsos on or under the griddle which must have accounted for many hundreds.
He also composed a formal cable to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, D.C., stating:
The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”
If you have relatives, neighbors, or friends who make casual references to President Trump as Hitler, or compare our border agents to Nazis, remind them what really happened in the Holocaust. Beg them—for the sake of our civic peace, and for the sake of human decency—to stop.