When hate becomes mainstream
My friend drew the symbol on the back of my school notebook. I had no idea what it was but he was a cool kid, so I let him do it. We were in the fourth grade.
When I got home, Mom spotted it as she checked my homework and showed it to Dad. He grew red in the face but he held his temper and asked quietly: “Do you know what this is?” I shook my head no.
“It’s a Nazi swastika,” he said. “We fought the Nazis during the war. Don’t you ever put that damn thing on anything else again.” And then he blacked out the symbol with a marker and gave my notebook back to me.
It would be many years before I knew enough about the Nazis to fully understand why my father was so upset that night in 1966. But I’ve never forgotten his visceral reaction. To him and countless others, whether they fought in World War II or not, the swastika stood for pure evil.
Today’s neo-Nazis and white supremacists stand for the same thing, even though some of them dress better and use the slick, techno term “alt-right” to refer to themselves. Catchy new name. Same old hate.
That’s why we can’t let Steve Bannon off the hook.
The Breitbart News impresario and now a top aide to Presidentelect Donald Trump isn’t a racist himself, his supporters claim, and how is it his fault if his website attracts the uglies? He’s just an opportunist who uses the bigots as dupes, their argument goes.
But isn’t that like saying that George Wallace, the segregationist governor who ran Alabama in the 1960s, wasn’t a racist? Wallace, who stood in the schoolhouse door and refused to let African-American students pass, was just an opportunist, you might argue, pandering to his base of poor white Southerners.
But whether Wallace was racist or not, the outcome was the same for southern blacks.
Under Bannon, Breitbart has pandered to racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic extremists. He provided a forum for racists to talk about racism. And he encouraged them.
Two weeks after white supremacist Dylann Roof gunned down nine African-Americans during a Bible study meeting inside a Charleston, S.C., church, Breitbart published an article under the headline: “Hoist it high and proud: The Confederate flag proclaims a glorious heritage.” The piece argued that the Confederate states weren’t trying to keep black Americans enslaved, after all. They were engaged in “a patriotic and idealistic cause.”
In May, a Breitbart headline blared, “Bill Kristol: Republican spoiler, renegade Jew,” and in January it published a anti-Muslim screed from the anti-immigrant pol Tom Tancredo headlined: “Political correctness protects Muslim rape culture,” which warned of an “epidemic” of rape across Europe.
A piece last December by Milo Yiannopoulos was headlined: “Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy.” The article noted, “We need the kids if we’re to breed enough to keep the Muslim invaders at bay.”
Trump has condemned the National Policy Institute, which is run by Richard Spencer, the group that cheered Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton with a hearty “Hail victory!” — that’s “Seig Heil!” in German. And Trump has made a fainthearted appeal to the racists to stop harassing people.
But the new leader of the free world still wants Bannon at his side, the man who told Mother Jones at the Republican National Convention that Breitbart was “the platform for the alt-right.”
If we allow the ugliness that too often spills from Breitbart to go mainstream and white nationalism to become just one more point on the political spectrum, we lose something very important: The furious, gut-level reaction of a father who sees a swastika on his son’s school notebook.
Sometimes history doesn’t have to wait to judge — and when it comes to dictators, even dead ones, we shouldn’t either.
With news of Fidel Castro’s death last week —
— world leaders began offering eulogies, some of which were so vapid or willfully ignorant that Castro might have written them himself. It would appear in any case that the 20thcentury’s quintessential “Big Brother” managed to infect a few world leaders with an Orwellian strain of mushy-mouthed aphasia.
Apparently bereft of the right words, they treated Castro’s brutality as polite unmentionables, serving up platitudes as though just another important figure had passed on to his maker.
Did they miss the screams?
Growing up in Florida during the Cuban missile crisis, running bomb shelter drills and hearing the stories of refugees who became lifelong friends, I somehow managed to evade the charms of the revolutionary rogue, who merely replaced one dictatorship with another far worse. There’s nothing sentimental about a ruthless dictator who once held the world hostage to a possible nuclear Armageddon.
It’s one thing to be respectful of the Cuban people — and I’m not suggesting we celebrate