Holocausts In Prospect

There are a lot of gaps in my reading, and Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” was one of them. I’ve finally gotten through it. My interest is in parallels between Nazi Germany and the U.S., which I will get to in a moment, though that is not the focus of the book.

Much of the report on the Eichmann trial dwells on the difficult legal and philosophical issues raised by the interest in bringing to account somebody charged with “crimes against humanity.” The legal and philosophical issues are very complex, and mostly over my head. My chief interest was in the simpler historical material on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. One detail that is hard to forget is Arendt’s claim that the Nazis fully intended to exterminate the Poles, as well as Jews and others, and this objective was set in the 1930s.

The most sensational material, on the collaboration between Zionists and Nazis, is actually an old story, well-known and not even controversial in Israel. It doesn’t mean much to me. Under threat of torture and death, it’s hard to expect people to be heroes. Neither can the fact that submission to the Nazis aimed at alleviating any such threats proved utterly futile be counted against the doomed. Nobody could be blamed for failing to anticipate such an extraordinary outcome.

It’s possible to score cheap points against Zionism by dwelling on the Nazi’s Zionist period, when they were focused on simply ridding Germany of Jews rather than killing them all, but once again the collaboration does not stir up moralistic rage in me. Zionists were desperate to get Jews out of Europe, as long as it was to Palestine. They made trade-offs that look morally unacceptable, though the fact was that there was nowhere else for Jews to go. Practicality let Zionists off the hook. As above, from the comfort of the U.S. Diaspora in 2024, it’s not for me to make moral judgements on those in the desperate 1930s.

Arendt’s psychological profile of Eichmann is elaborate but nor is that of particular interest to me. My sense is that investing responsibility for the Final Solution in this one, unimpressive, lower-level functionary enraged Arendt. She is at pains to emphasize the responsibility of the entire German nation and its many allies throughout Europe. Support for outright genocide was especially pronounced in Eastern European countries. So too today in the U.S., Trump could drop dead tomorrow but his followers would be a lingering problem. They would find a new leader before long. The sickness of the deplorables would persist.

The big parallel that comes out of the book is that between European Jews and today’s immigrants from the Global South in the U.S. and Europe. Demagogues are profiting from depictions of immigrants as carriers of disease, crime, political subversion, terrorism, and cultural decay, not extremely different from the Nazi slurs about the Jews. As the old saying goes, history may not repeat itself exactly, but it rhymes.

The first resort for undesirables is to simply expel them, which was also the policy of the Nazis until they were at war with the rest of Europe and it was obvious they would lose that war. The practical difficulties in rounding up and deporting Jews supported the objective of physical liquidation. I am not suggesting that extermination was not a hope for any Nazis or Hitler himself before the 1940s, only the political point that once it is alleged that a segment of the population is a mortal danger to society, the policy of expelling them sits at the top of a slippery slope to physical liquidation as social policy. This is a threat throughout the “First World” nations of the Americas and Europe, with regard to the press of immigrants from nations of the Global South, where habitability is pushed to the limits of survival by climate change, criminal gangs, economic exploitation, and political tyranny.

That’s where we are now in the U.S., with lies about immigrants opening the door to much worse. To begin with, many immigrants are stateless for all practical purposes. They lack documentation, nor is it clear that other countries, even their countries of origin, would accept them.

The camps promised by Trump could easily end up as death traps. Some European governments before World War II declared Jews, among others, stateless (lacking citizenship) by fiat. In the British miniseries “Years and Years,” the Trump analog who takes political power notes that the British colonialist Lord Kitchener in South Africa pioneered the way to rid a country of undesirable persons en masse. You put them in camps with minimal resources — adequate shelter, nutrition, and medical care — and they just die off from privation.

Many U.S. minorities feel little or no kinship or sympathy with immigrants and support Trump. I have a theory about this which suggests that even from the standpoint of craven self-interest, it is unwise for Latinos or Asians or African-Americans to look past xenophobia. There is a Nazi analog here too, as many Jews who collaborated with the Nazis for the sake of rendering matters less bad, out of whatever personal motives, ended up among the condemned.

The theory, which may not be original, much less intelligent, is that the thirty percent of our population that is batshit crazy likes to put all its problems on immigrants. After the immigrants are disposed of, or there is some kind of show of addressing the “problem,” the grievances of the deplorable thirty percent will remain. Xenophobes will be receptive to transferring their bigotry to other identifiable groups. That means anybody who is not white and Christian. In principle, all POC, Asians, Jews, Muslims, LGBTQI are in the bullseye.

Nor should we forget the Left, and Democrats more generally, are routinely excoriated by Trump in his tirades. (Hitler’s first attacks focused on the Left.) If Joe Biden is a radical liberal, so is every other Democrat. Trump’s QAnon allies put the Democratic higher-ups into a pedophilia ring. Note that Jews not aligned with the Israeli government fall into that category as well. We can also see transphobia bleeding into prejudice against LGBTQI persons more broadly under the lies about “groomers.”

You might think that citizenship would protect many from abuse, but that was not the case in Germany and elsewhere. Citizenship is a legal matter, and laws can be rewritten, or under political pressure simply ignored altogether. Wealth that might protect oneself can be expropriated, as was done systematically by the Nazis. Our batshit-crazy fellow citizens think a president should be able to do anything, as long as he isn’t a Democrat. We have also begun to hear rhetoric along these lines from the Right — rants against “anchor babies,” birthright citizenship, and naturalization of the foreign-born.

The upshot is that the problem of immigration, really spurious concerns about immigration in Europe and the U.S., threaten to unravel our democratic institutions and the fundamental safety of politically disempowered branches of the population.