It’s up to all Americans to take a stand and speak out against hate

Friday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, an annual day that calls upon people around the world to honor the memory of the six million Jews and millions of non-jews who died at the hands of Nazis between 1933 and 1945.

With Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, the rise of antisemitism and hate crimes around the world and even our own government officials advocating for legislation that targets LGBTQ+ people, refugees and other marginalized communities, the risk of repeating the sin of the Holocaust has never been greater and there are lessons we can take from that murderous time.

The Holocaust did not occur accidentally. Its perpetrators used intentional strategies and rhetoric to manipulate gullible people into following them. Today, Vladimir Putin is using the image of Nazis — even as he employs Adolf Hitler’s own strategies in perpetrating it — to justify his murderous invasion of Ukraine.

He’s lying about Ukrainians being Nazis and spreading propaganda to rally the gullible or the uneducated to the cause of destroying Ukraine. Meanwhile, Putin targets civilian populations, launching missiles at hospitals, schools, apartment complexes and power-distribution centers, while simultaneously claiming that that NATO members’ decision to send tanks is an unprovoked and unjustified act of aggression. And just like Hitler and Josef Stalin before him, Putin silences dissent with an iron fist, using law enforcement, violence, torture and even murder to ensure that his voice is the only one his people are listening to.

Putin is trading on Russian memories and images of horrors endured at Nazi hands. While this is different than the way in which GOP leaders in the United States are abusing the memories of victims of the Holocaust, both are dangerous and present an imminent risk of repeating the horrors of the Holocaust for a new generation.

A current United States representative, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has accused an unidentified Jewish cabal of using space lasers to start wildfires in the Western United States. She also proudly spoke at a white nationalist conference organized by avowed Hitler fan Nick Fuentes.

The former president of the United States and standard-bearer of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, has invited Holocaust deniers and militant antisemitic white supremacists to dine with him at his home in Florida. That was after he described antisemitic terrorists who chanted “Jews shall not replace us” and murdered a young woman in Charlottesville, Va., as “fine people.”

These are not isolated incidents. Rather than being on the fringes of the far right, Holocaust deniers and antisemitic hate mongers now have significant power and influence on the leadership of the GOP. They’re driving a national narrative of hate that is leading to increases in violence and hate crimes targeting Jews and other underrepresented communities.

All Americans, Jews and non-jews alike, should be deeply concerned about these developments. Remember, Jews were targeted for extermination first, but the Nazis had a long list of social enemies who were eventually targeted due to everything from their sexual orientation and skin color, to having physical or mental disabilities or being of the “wrong” nationality or ethnicity. Their “final solution” was to identify broad swaths of people who were “other than us” and then dehumanize, degrade, enslave and kill them all.

This is what is so concerning about Florida’s current governor, Ron Desantis, who is seen among the favorite candidates for the 2024 Republican Party presidential nomination. Desantis is using the power of his office to silence people and businesses that promote the rights and equality of LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized communities. In the wake of the protests over the killing of George Floyd, Desantis pushed through laws to grant civil immunity to people who run over protesters who block the road and rendered the act of tearing up a Confederate flag a second-degree felony.

Bear in mind, Gov. Desantis is not simply disagreeing or advocating for his own beliefs. He is using the power of the state to pursue his personal agenda to punish and thus silence dissent. When Disney executives spoke out against one of Desantis’ proposed bills, he didn’t argue with them about the merits of his proposal, he targeted the company’s right to exist in Florida.

Desantis’ attacks on free speech in schools and banning of curriculum that teaches about African American history, LGBTQ+ history and the history of legalized oppression of marginalized communities in the United States are also affronts to the memory of Holocaust survivors. The U.N. resolution that created International Holocaust Remembrance Day called on governments to create educational programs about Holocaust history to help prevent future acts of genocide.

The number of hateful anti-democratic conspiracy theorists in the U.S. Congress is on the rise. Simultaneously, militant white nationalists and neonazis have become more emboldened. In recent years they’ve graduated from armed standoffs as on the Bundy ranch to attacks on remote federal facilities like Ammon Bundy’s 2016 takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and attack on the US Capitol. In Las Vegas, we have not been immune to violent antisemitism either. Only a few years have passed since law enforcement sniffed out and stopped a planned massacre in a local temple.

Unsurprisingly, the rise in white nationalism has been accompanied by a rise in antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia and other hateful rhetoric that is eerily familiar to students and survivors of the Holocaust.

Commemorations like International Holocaust Remembrance Day are reminders that it is up to us – each and every American who believes in democracy, freedom and equality under the law – to take a stand against hateful policies and rhetoric.

While it is certainly true that all Republicans are not hateful white nationalists, it is also true that white nationalists in alarming numbers have found a welcome home in the GOP. Too often we find GOP politicians and pundits willing to carry water for monsters. Americans of all political stripes must demand better from Republican leadership or shun the party at the ballot box.

Remember, Jews were targeted for extermination first, but the Nazis had a long list of social enemies who were eventually targeted due to everything from their sexual orientation and skin color, to having physical or mental disabilities or being of the “wrong” nationality or ethnicity.