White supremacy: a whack-a-mole viewpoint of racial purity.
On a February Sunday in 1939, over 20,000 members of the hate-filled American Nazis Party filled Madison Square Gardens in New York to denounce Jewish conspiracies and President Roosevelt. The larger-than-life backdrop was an image of George Washington flanked by U.S. flag and swastikas.
Billed as a Pro America rally in 1939, it’s a shocking reminder when we see similar rallies today. The seven-minute film, A Night at the Garden, by Marshall Curry Productions takes a modern audience back to that disturbing gathering. It’s a chilling reminder in today’s political climate, a reminder about the power of far-right ideology.
According to The Atlantic, 70 local branches around the country, tens of thousands joined the German American Bund (referring to themselves as patriotic Americans). They vowed support for ‘virtues,’ of the Nazi Party in the Fatherland.
We now know those goals included systematic slaughter during the holocaust. Hitler developed Germany’s white supremacy and racial laws emulating Jim Crow laws in this country.
A war was fought to defeat such an ideology. It was never eliminated in this country, or any other country for that matter. It slipped back under the surface – as it has for eons – only to erupt like a puss-filled boil today.
Throughout history, authoritarians have attacked intellectuals, science and democracy. Anesthetized into thinking it will never happen again, are we are doomed to repeat what Heinrich Heine observed almost three hundred years ago? “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people.” That quote also serves as a metaphor for destroying any thoughts and ideas contrary to the dictatorship.
From another angle, Lincoln described it like this. “It is the eternal struggle between two principles, right and wrong, throughout the world. It is the same spirit that says ‘you toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation, and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”
Some say it was Jefferson who said the cost of liberty is eternal vigilance. I think John F. Kennedy summed it up when he reminded us the cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose…surrender or submission.
Have we put that in the past? I fear not. In fact, I know not. We can only blame ourselves for allowing Nazi-like purification to flourish. It’s still there, like a weed, waiting to suck energy from all the plants and grass around it.
We are encouraged in our world today to “See something, say something.” Instead of trying to learn an understand of movements like Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory, I propose we listen to the words used to attack them and hear them as a knee-jerk reaction White Supremacist have when their bias, racism, anti-Semitism, and prejudices are seen for what it is in the light of day.
We need a motto. See something, say something, in fact shout something whenever we hear or read another whack-a-mole version of White Supremacy.