Nones

What are we to make of these three anniversaries? First, while honoring the memory of veterans tomorrow, we should also acknowledge that the Great War was a mistake. America should never have joined. Second, in properly recalling the demonic Hitler's antisemitism, we can also reckon with the complicity of a larger culture. What crimes make us bystanders today? And third, trumping the horrors of the 20th century, its most important event was the nonviolent resolution of the nuclear-armed Cold War. "Power to the people" proved true, and what they used their power for was peace. Three anniversaries, with emphasis given to hope. --James Carroll

I’ve read that quote many times, and only now does it occur to me to stop at “the complicity of a larger culture.” Because American culture was complicit in “demonic Hitler’s antisemitism” even then.

As I've pointed out before, the laws Hitler & Co. drew up to oppress, suppress, and finally exterminate Jews and other "undesirables," were modeled on laws on the books in this country, and based on the science of eugenics.  Which only became a "pseudo-science" after the Holocaust.  It was scientific enough to base many laws requiring forced sterilization, until it wasn't.  And please don't knee-jerk me with "religion did it, too!"

"The American Experience" reviewed, in two hours, the history of eugenics in America, a history that starts with Darwin and creates the word "eugenics" (coined by an American from Greek, the word means "well-bred." Listening to the scholars on the show talk about the desire to secure utopia that eugenics was supposed to deliver, one wishes they would remember Thomas More coined that word from Greek, too. It means "nowhere."), an idea that all too quickly exploded into law and national policy in the 20's and 30's. It rose as church affiliation fell to its lowest point in the century. Trust in God replaced by trust in science. God will not improve the world, but science will. William Jennings Bryant, the man mocked in the movie about the Scopes trial, actually opposed the abuse of people in the name of science. He was a very religious man, not the man of science Darrow was, and yet we still only remember Bryant as a caricature. Although science eventually rejected the idea of eugenics, it didn't reject the reasoning behind it.  And it wasn't science that turned the public against it.

Science didn't reject the reasoning behind eugenics; just the use of it in law.

The documentary mentions a Hollywood movie from the '30's, in which our heroine, young and photogenic, is forced to undergo sterilization because her family is nothing but criminals, prostitutes, and the impoverished.  She is spared the indignity at the last moment when it turns out, not that that law or science is wrong, but that she's adopted!  No inherited taint!  Thus did society start to reject the laws of eugenics; they shouldn't apply to innocent young beautiful white women.  We held on to the reasoning, we just thought ourselves more careful about applying it.  

Which I can't help notice sounds somewhat like this:

"He is going to use the power of the state," [Rick] Wilson explained. "All my libertarian friends should be paying attention: the power of the state to achieve his personal, political vengeance on people who he believes have wronged him."

"This is not America, to quote David Bowie," he continued. "This is something much darker and much different and much more dangerous. We have to pay attention to it, we have to listen to it." 

Be afraid, well-off white people!  Be very afraid!!  "This is not America"?  Takes me back to Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock on SNL the weekend after Trump won in 2016; shaking their heads sagely as the white people in the apartment lost their shit because the blatantly misogynistic racist had won the Presidency.  Chappelle and Rock were not surprised.  Three guesses why, first two don't count.

"The power of the state to achieve....political vengeance on people"?  Yes, I altered that statement slightly.  It's scarier when it's personal; at least to people not used to being on the receiving end of the power of the state.  But this is America.  We've always used the power of the state against people; we just usually defined them as "not people."  After all, "Three generations of imbeciles is enough!"  It’s not quite the same when “people” replace “imbeciles” there, is it?

What has changed, really? No, we don't forcibly sterilize people now; but we do want to drive the "undesirables" away from "polite society."  The conservative stance in my home state is to give people public money so they can abandon public schools.  What brought that on except Brown v Board?  As Faulkner said, the past isn't over; it isn't even past.  But we want it to be over, and passed, and remove its dead hand from us.  So college students (a few, frankly; a vanishing few. I came across this video of a student (and some off screen) chanting about an end to war in Gaza.  I don't see any students joining the chant, or giving a rat's ass.  Opinions are like assholes; everybody has one. What I'm quite sure those students don't want, is the dead hand of history mucking up their ignorant myopia*.) complain about the present situation in Gaza. We have expunged from popular memory our complicity in the Holocaust, and not just in not invading Germany on a humanitarian mission to stop it from proceeding, or even getting started.

Our racism is entirely our own; we just sometimes share it, in a cruel synchronicity, with other countries.  Reflected back to us, it is ugly.  But we don't like to acknowledge it is a reflection we see.

Trump wants to set loose that “irresistible current of nihilism” Carroll also referenced. Despite our own sordid history, and our determination to ignore it, we are very well poised not to let him. Not only is MAGA not an electoral force, racism is still not an acceptable idea. We aren’t free of it; but half a loaf is better than none. And “none,” or good old fashioned nihilism, is all that Trump is offering. There’s no real sign enough people in America are accepting that offer.

*Besides, as the man said:

When my generation shut down entire universities for days, it was brave free speech. When yours interrupts classes for a few minutes, it’s woke DEI fascism.