SS Guards at Play, Lynching and Donald Trump: Normalizing the Unthinkable
December 27, 2019
A day at Auschwitz, as life was normalized for guards (US Holocaust Memorial Museum)
By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation
Author’s Note: Back in 2007, I published a column on the original BuzzFlash entitled “SS Guards at Play.” At the request of my dear friend Mark Karlin, editor and publisher of BuzzFlash, I am revisiting that column, with some new perspectives added.
At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC is an extensive collection of photos from the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz. The photos show these extermination camp guards “on break,” in 1944 at the height of the camp’s mass murdering campaign, having picnic lunches, engaging in choral singing, playing with their dogs, gathering for smiling group photos, and smoking cigarettes. (This was so even though at Hitler's behest in the 1930’s, the Nazis had instituted the world's first comprehensive anti-smoking campaign, in Germany. And there you thought that all German armed forces members always followed orders.) They even decorated Christmas trees (after all, the slogan "Gott mit Uns" was on their belt buckles). And all this time, thousands of Jews and other nationalities were being gassed and burned at the camp every day. Talk about the banality of evil.
Among the reactions to the contents of the exhibit was expressed by The New York Times columnist Roger Cohen ("Down Time from Murder," NYT, 9-24-07): how could those Germans go about their daily lives and laugh on breaks and retreats? Oh those “just awful” Germans. “How unique they were.” Oh really?
Funny, but I was reminded of the set of photographs taken over many decades, some of which were actually made into picture postcards sent through the US mails, of public lynchings in the U.S. South. (You can see an extensive collection of them here.) People, other than the victims, laughing, smiling, kids playing, (no link necessary for this one) having lunch, and acting as if a lynching was a celebratory spectacle. How could that happen? And how indeed, only the Germans did that later on during the Holocaust. And then I also thought of those smiling photos of the guards at Abu Ghraib, Iraq. Just ordinary folks, having fun while brutalizing Iraqi prisoners. And then, we have the reports of the for-fun shootings of Iraqi civilians by Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq and the ongoing horror of Guantanamo.
So, is it just us and the Germans who goes about our business while horrors are committed in our name? Well, no. It is any nationality that is fed the line that certain people who look just like humans, actually aren't. For the Germans, the Jews the Romanos and the Slavs were subhuman. For the Turks, it was the Armenians.. For the American South it was (and unfortunately in a variety of parts of our country it still is) that Blacks were subhuman. For Trump, it is brown people trying to save their lives by coming to the US. For certain members of our Armed Forces, there was a message delivered to them somehow, that somehow their Iraqi prisoners were subhuman. Humans don't do to other humans what the particular members of our species recorded in all of these photos did. Those deeds are done only to “sub-humans.”
But it couldn't happen here again, could it? Nah. Couldn't possibly. We're just too advanced. No one could get away with labeling all of their political opponents as "traitors," as "Godless," as "just not like us," as "not Christian and thus not qualified to govern" (and yes, none other than “the maverick” John McCain said that in so many words back in 2007 (The Progress Report, "Blackout and Brownout," Oct. 1, 2007), and thus quite possibly somehow less than human. Couldn't happen here, could it. Could it? Just look at Trump, and the answer is yes.
But back to lynching, which was an execution, by mob action, without due process of law. It was carried out primarily in the South, both before and after the Civil War, most often (but not always) against African Americans. Lynching was condonded throughout the slave-holding South, of course during the Confederacy, and then onward from the middle of Reconstruction (1865-77) through the Jim Crow Era. Although its use came to an end around 1968, following the passage of the Civil Rights Act,
Lynching, which could happen to anyone, at any time, at any place, throughout the states of the Old Confederacy, was a primary weapon for the enforcement of the doctrine of white supremacy.throughout those states. It was vicious. It was murder. It was arbitrary. And by the photographs, which made it onto postcards, it was celebrated throughout the South because, of course, “Blacks” were considered “subhuman,” as well as having to be “kept in their place,” by the use of random violence if deemed necessary, as well as by the “Jim Crow” laws that enforced legal separation, discrimination and second-class citizenship for Blacks. Lynching indeed was one of the primary weapons used by the Southern states to enforce segregation and its resulting second-class subhuman status for blacks.
And then we come to Trump, who actually used the term to describe the impeachment proceedings which have now been passed in the House as articles of impeachment. How to account for this totally ahistorical use of the term? Briefly, there is a combination of explanations. First of all, he is widely considered to be a racist. Second of all, he repeatedly uses racism and racist tropes to promote himself, his Presidency and his reelection campaign.
But third, and most importantly, that Trump would use the term, which defines the most violent instrument of oppression of Blacks used in the South from the slave era until the very end of the Jim Crow Era, to describe a Constitutional procedure (see Article I; it’s a power of the Congress) that has been undertaken against him for infractions of the Constitution. The doctrine of white supremacy, tells you all you need to know about the man. He demonstrates his complete lack of knowledge of American history. He demonstrates his complete lack of knowledge of the Constitution (one has to doubt that he has ever read it, and if he has, he certainly has not the slightest knowledge of what it does and does not provide for presidential dictatorship.). And once again, he reveals the fundamental racism that is at the core of his being.
As the impeachment process proceeds, at the appropriate times and appropriate stages Trump has been provided with every privilege of the due process of law. For him to use the term which described a series of acts in which Southern blacks were provided with not a scrap of due process of law and were extra-judicially murdered in public, with their pictures being taken amidst “celebrating” crowds, to describe what is happening to him as “lynching”, once again tells you everything you need to know about this racist, cruel, sociopathic, egomaniac of a man who, because of that descendant of the institution of slavery known as the Electoral College, somehow became President of the United States.
Editor’s Update: And life continues as normal in the United States as Trump conducts a brutal assault on refugees of color on the Mexican border.. Yes, evil and the banality of daily life unfolding can exist anywhere.
Steven Jonas, MD, MPH, MS is a Professor Emeritus of Preventive Medicine at StonyBrookMedicine (NY) and author/co-author/editor/co-editor of over 35 books. He is an occasional contributor to BuzzFlashReborn (after having been a long-time contributor to the original). In addition, he is a “Trusted Author” for Op-Ed News. a contributor to Reader Supported News/Writing for Godot; a contributor to From The G-Man; a contributor for American Politics to The Planetary Movement; and a Deputy Editor, Politics, and a “Witness to History,” and an occasional contributor for The Greanville Post; He is also a triathlete (36 seasons, 256 multi-sport races).
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