Never again is now

 

Eighty-five years ago tonight Beth Zion synagogue in Berlin was destroyed in the pogrom remembered as Kristallnacht.  It was rebuilt and reopened in 2014.  Three weeks ago it was firebombed by two masked men.  Germany, like so many other countries, is seeing a rise in antisemitic violence.  Chancellor Olaf Scholz said, "Something is surely coming apart at the seams."  This was true long before the Hamas attacks a month ago kickstarted a full-blown war in Gaza.

Antisemitism slithered onto the stage of the Adrienne Arscht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, where five empty suits competed for a nomination they have no chance of getting.  The most repulsive decided to appeal to the party's Putin core by slagging off Ukraine and its Jewish president:  "It has celebrated a Nazi in its ranks.  The comedian in cargo pants, a man called Zelenskyy, doing it in their own ranks...Those are the hard facts and sort of framed this as some kind of battle between good and evil."  Vivek Ramaswamy's spokesgirl had to explain that he was referring to an event in the Canadian parliament when a 98-year-old Ukrainian-Canadian got an ovation before the government knew he was one of many Ukrainians drafted into the Nazi ranks.  "He was talking quickly and kind of oscillated in his words," she explained.  Nikki Haley put it more succinctly:  "You are scum."  The people who like to remind us that Zelenskyy is Jewish are the people who accuse George Soros of having been a Nazi collaborator.  

That's how antisemitism works.  Jews are capitalists and communists, clannish and globalist, all-powerful and still plotting world domination.  And anything else the demagogue of the moment happens to need.  The mystery is why fascists like Putin and Trump and Orban call other people fascists.  It helps if you're talking to people who don't know or care what words mean.

Hillary Clinton has read the Washington Post's analysis of Trump's fairly advanced plans to introduce strong-man rule should he again seize power.  She too was reminded of Hitler.  "Trump is telling us what he intends to do.  Take him at his word," she told The View, which is not a place most people turn for political news.  But she was right in 2016.