Warnings from Kristallnacht and Hannah Arendt
Prepare for the worst during Trump's second term
On November 10th, 2024, I joined a memorial march in remembrance of the immense suffering committed by the Nazi SA, SS, and Hitler Youth during the Kristallnacht (night of broken glass) in Oldenburg, Germany. There must have been thousands of people there. We followed the route from the former police station where local Jewish men were brought after being torn from their homes and businesses. We walked by the marker were the synagogue used to be. It would have been burning that day in 1938. The march ended at the jail where the Jews were imprisoned, where several committed suicide and those who remained were deported to concentration camps. Oldenburg was the first city in Germany to elect a Nazi.
After walking in the footsteps of this horrific night, the final speech called on everyone there to have empathy, to stand up for the rights of minorities, to do everything in our power to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. My thoughts were with the Palestinians, Congolese, Sudanese, Ukrainians (and the poor Russian and North Korean soldiers too, who are used as canon fodder for their dictator's wishes). It is happening again. Now with the new US government, Trump and his team announced that they will begin a Kristallnacht of their own on Tuesday (January 21, 2025), beginning in Chicago.
Hannah Arendt reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker, which became her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. In the book she criticises the Jewish councils for cooperating with the Nazis, sacrificing ordinary Jewish people by handing over personal details, especially addresses, in exchange for receiving safe passage of wealth, possessions, and illegal resettlement of “important” people in then Palestine. Without such cooperation, Arendt suggests the death rate of the Holocaust would not have been so high, or if there was a stronger German resistance from the beginning.
She discusses how submission to Nazi authority didn't help Jews either. Jews outnumbered the guards marching them to their deaths, and should have rebelled, according to Arendt. The shock and unimaginable violence was extremely effective. Probably most people transported to Treblinka under the pretence of relocation to Ukraine proceeded in stark disbelief when they were told to stand or lie naked in the pit of the dead. I believe this is where most people are today: in disbelief that things could ever get that bad. Anything can happen, though, and it's better not to wait around and find out, but to do everything possible to prepare and prevent another Kristallnacht or “final solution” from happening.
It's no use to say that none of this would be a concern had the Democrats won the presidential race or that the election was rigged. They lost and now the entire world has to face the force of America's choices.
Immigrants have been dehumanized since the first waves of Europeans arrived in North America. We should be familiar with the Indigenous genocide that took place then and the continued poor treatment of Indigenous people in the Americas. It's easy to villainise immigrants and politicians love to offer a simple scapegoat fix that will solve imaginary problems. Retired cops turned propagandists claiming to be border security experts gain financially by giving speeches and spreading fear. The real problems facing Americans, and the rest of the world, stem from the wealthy having accumulated too much wealth. They have become too powerful and make decisions to empower themselves at the expense of everyone else. The rest of the problems are ecological in nature. The problem for the wealthy is that environmental regulations, just like human rights, stand in the way of accumulating even more wealth. Elon Musk wants to be the first trillionaire and he will do whatever it takes to get there.
Americans who have empathy need to be brave and stand up for the rights of every at-risk person. Not everyone marched to prison on Kristallnacht was actually Jewish. Perhaps their grandparents had converted to protestantism. Perhaps they had fought for Germany in World War I, and even become decorated heroes. They saw themselves as Germans but we know, of course, that the Nazis did not. The Nazis believed that Jewish people were a race separate from Germans. Germans today still view people along similar lines. Some Canadians do too. During the Harper years, there was a concept of “old stock” Canadians, meaning people of English ancestry. Some of Harper's supporters believed that these people should be privileged above more recent arrivals. In Sweden, the far right political party, Swedish Democrats, have floated the idea that any person who has immigrated to Sweden since 1970 should be deported. In Germany, Trump and Musk's favourite German political party, the far right Alternative for Germany, has called for the deportation of immigrants and refugees, too, under a different word, “remigration”. The Swedish Democrats and the Alternative for German are popular, but they don't have majority control over their government and probably never will. Trump is now in his second term.
I'm writing this to scare you, so that you are not shocked when bad things begin happening around you, like the Jews murdered in Treblinka. You can act. Rebel before ICE agents come to take you and your neighbours away. Organize to protect provide sanctuary to those who need it. ICE agents will be in Chicago in four days.
The “decentralized network pledged to anonymous collective action” known as CrimethInc put out a pamphlet, The Case For Resistance about resisting Trump's second term. You can download it for free by following the link in the last sentence. I highly recommend giving it a read and sharing it with friends. Everyone is vulnerable under an authoritarian regime. You can never be too prepared.
Walk of Remembrance (Erinnerungsgang). On November 10, 1938, 43 Jewish men arrested during the pogrom night were forced to take a degrading walk that took them from the police barracks at the Pferdemarkt past the destroyed synagogue in Peterstrasse, through Haarenstrasse, Lange Strasse, across Schlossplatz and through Elisabethstrasse to the prison. Many of the city's citizens watched idly. The following day, they were deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp with other imprisoned Jews from Oldenburg and East Frisia. Since 1982, people from the city and the surrounding area have taken this walk every November 10 to commemorate the injustice that occurred at that time.