New York, April 24 At a time when Homeland Security head John Kelly and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have been touring the U.S./Mexico border leading the charge to demonize and terrorize immigrants, about 25 people gathered on Holocaust Remembrance Day in front of the Jewish Heritage Museum in NYC, and marched in a procession to the Federal Building. They sounded the alarm about the dangerous direction the Trump/Pence Regime is headed in, how its actions echo that of Nazi Germany, and sent a powerful message that Never Again will we allow another Holocaust to happen to any people.
Travis Morales opened by speaking directly to the connection between the escalating attacks on immigrants and Muslims by the Trump Regime and the demonization and targeting of the Jewish people by the Nazis, how this has a logic and momentum that can lead to real horrors, and why our answer to that must be Never Again. Scott Gilbert, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, his mother a childhood friend of Anne Frank, spoke about the parallels between Germany in the 1930s and Trump’s America—citing, for example, the quote from Trump’s senior advisor Steven Miller that the president’s authority “will not be questioned,” and comparing it to a similar quote from Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. He described his own process of questioning how it was that the German people could’ve allowed such an atrocity and coming to dedicate himself to making sure that something like that would never happen again. And he put a challenge to everyone, that if “Never Again” is going to mean anything, it has to mean something now – when immigrants, Muslims, and people all over the world are being threatened by the Trump/Pence fascist regime in the most powerfully militarized country on earth.
Statements in support of this action were sent to Refuse Fascism from David Meyerhof, grandson of Holocaust survivor Otto Meyerhof; Fidel Acosta-Fajardo, and others. Then the group, led by a procession of people in orange jumpsuits stamped with the words “ICE DETAINEE,” marched to the Federal Building. John Kelly was presented with the Adolf Eichmann Award for Leadership in the Field of Detention and Deportation of “Undesirables,” in recognition of his “outstanding achievements.” Jeff Sessions was presented with the Joseph Goebbels Excellence Award for Demonizing and Persecuting “Undesirables,” for his “outstanding achievements.”
Outside the museum a number of people stopped to check out what was happening. Some recognized the fascism the Trump regime, while a few said it was “inappropriate” to compare the U.S. in 2017 to Germany in 1933. One woman said she was brought to tears listening to the speakers. As the procession marched for a mile through downtown Manhattan, people’s heads turned and many reached out for flyers. One woman said, “I can really see how this could be like another holocaust, the way they are targeting whole groups of people like that. This is how it starts.”
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Below are statements that were read as part of this day, saying NO!
Fascism Needs to be Stopped Before It is Too Late
by Scott Morrell, who worked with Refuse Fascism on the Holocaust Remembrance Day action April 24, 2017
“WE hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–“
The Trump/Pence regime are using the same playbook as the Germans did in1933. Circa 1933 Germany, an advanced society with strong institutions. Elections were held because many wanted change in their economic situation. Then Adolph Hitler rose to power. He promised change, he promised to ‘make Germany great again,’ but he had a grander plan so evil and insidious, the Germans were willing to close their eyes, even when they saw the early signs and chose not to act.
They believed these incremental steps by Hitler could never lead to anything harmful. They rationalized each rip of the fabric of their democracy as necessary steps for a greater good. Even the Jews looked the other way because they considered themselves Germans first. Like most citizens, they did not believe that they would be targeted more so than any other Germans. Only a few years later, the dehumanization of the Jews, Gypsies and “others” were now part of common parlance.
The similarities of actions between the Trump administration and Hitler’s Germany are instructive and frightening
Trump’s plan to dehumanize Mexicans, Women, Gays, Muslims, and “Blacks” mimics Hitler’s treatment to the Jews, Gypsies and “others.”
Trump’s deportation forces headed by General Kelly from ICE is reminiscent of Adolph Eichmann’s grand plan to deport the non-Aryans.
We cannot turn a blind eye as Trump’s sweeping discriminatory plans are similar to the incremental steps which lead to Germany‘s Final Solution.
The lessons of Hitler’s fascist regime have all the hallmarks of Trump’s policies, but mere social discourse is not enough. We must mobilize NOW!!!
Please join this important rally and march starting at the Museum of Jewish Heritage to the U.S. Federal building on April 24th at 3:00pm.
We must all let our voices be heard to make sure that the Trump/Pence regime knows we are watching, and we will not ever allow history to repeat itself.
We must drive the Trump/Pence regime out of power now, because fascism needs to be stopped early…before it is too late!
Holocaust Remembrance Day Statement
(Statement by David Meyerhoff, grandson of Otto Meyerhoff, Nobel prize winner who survived the Holocaust.
My parents and my grandparents escaped from Germany and survived the Holocaust. My grandfather was a world-famous scientist who won the 1922 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology. If you Google my last name, it will come up a 1000+ times. My father and his parents were rescued by Varian Fry, the American Schindler who saved 2000 Jewish artists, authors, scientists, musicians and political leaders. My mother was rescued by the Kindertransport, which saved nearly 10,000 children from the Nazis. Here is her story:
My mother was 17 and living in an apartment in Berlin in 1938. She was studying to be a nursery school teacher. On the night of November 9, 1938 the young men living next door to her told her not to go out. That night was Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) when the Nazis attacked every Jewish person walking on the street, threw over 30,000 Jewish people in concentration camps, and smashed every window in every Jewish home, school, business, and synagogue so that the ground was filled with so much glass it looked like crystals.
Within 3 weeks my mother was able to go on the Kindertransport to England to safety and a new life. During World War II she took care of children in Anna Freud’s Children’s Center in London.
My mother passed away in June 2015 at the age of 94.
Life, as you know it, will not be the same, if we don’t fight against fascism. How you live, how you go to classes, how you work, what you see, what you care about, and who you care about are all threatened by this racist, fascist government. If we don’t take a stand and fight back against this dangerous fascist system being put into place, we face a Hitler-style dictatorship and it will be too late.This quotation is from a speech by my grandfather, Otto Meyerhof, winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology. He discovered basically how sugar is converted into energy in the human body and the Embden-Meyerhof Pathway, which is part of your digestive system.
“Distinguishing between Germans and Nazis …. is in itself a propaganda lie. I know what all, or 90%, of the professors did in 1933 when their Jewish colleagues, whom they had themselves appointed, were deprived of their rights and made homeless — and the same thing occurred in all academic circles and at all levels in society, except in certain areas of the church: maintained their cowardly silence or even satisfaction, and not even 1% of the professors were party members. In the same fashion, broad sections of the population, though overall a somewhat smaller percentage, willingly served as slaves and helpers to the tyrants, even helping as torturers and executioners. It is doesn’t help that a powerless minority kept their hands clean, or that hundreds themselves became martyrs through the strength of their convictions, if hundreds of thousands turned into murderers. It would have been physically impossible for five million Jews, 80-90% of all Jews in the countries that Germany occupied — 10 million Russian, Polish, Serbian and other civilians — to be killed by a few Nazi criminals: hundreds of thousands were necessary for this. A people without any sense of morality were behind these mass murders….”
This quotation further explains why this is critical:
Because you care about the future of this planet and you know that in these times the gravest problem is silence:
Don’t stop… Don’t conciliate… Don’t accommodate… Don’t collaborate.
“In the Name of Humanity, REFUSE To Accept a Fascist America.”
In the next week, we will have critical marches and demonstrations throughout this country. We must all support each one, but must set our sights even higher, if we are going to stop this country from becoming a Nazi America. The Trump/Pence regime is indeed Fascist and as such poses a mortal threat which must be defeated! We must unite all who can be united to get rid of this tyranny which is destroying our future.
My father once said, “One person can make the difference.” I AM ASKING YOU TO BE THAT PERSON.
A CALL TO ALL THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES:
A DECLARATION OF RESISTANCE TO FASCISM
We call upon all the people of the United States:
All nationalities,
All religions,
All sexes/All sexual orientations,
All ages,
All walks of life-employed, unemployed
TO UNITE AND RESIST FASCISM!
Do Not Let the Fascist Trump/Pence Regime Take Away our Freedom, Our rights, Our Diversity, Our Culture, The Environment and Humanity Itself!
Fidel Fajardo-Acosta Professor of English, Creighton University (Professor Fajardo is one of the 195 professors on the rightwing “Professors Watchlist”.)
23 April 2017
Remembering the Holocaust is an act of memory intended to honor the victims of fascism, but also an act of resistance meant to prevent the reoccurrence of such horrors. At the present moment in the United States, fascism has made a comeback and installed itself in the White House. There are many indications that the supposed electoral victory of Donald Trump was rigged up through fraud and treason. How exactly it happened is a matter for criminal investigators to unravel and one that likely will take some time to complete. In the meantime, it is the obligation of every thinking and decent American to speak up against and reject the abuses of the Trump-Pence junta, making clear this is an illegitimate regime that has seized power in not just questionable but thoroughly anti-democratic ways.
One of the tricks used by Trump to gain supporters is an old one that was popular in the Nazi Germany of the 1930s. It involved taking advantage of the despair and anger of working class people devastated by capitalist greed and its endless wars and depredations. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda (1933-1945), was one of the most notorious practitioners of that kind of chicanery. Who should be blamed for the misery of the German people after World War I? The Jews of course, so Goebbels and Hitler said. But World War I was precipitated not by the Jews but by the greed of German financiers and industrialists, arms dealers and megalomaniac madmen with delusions of racial superiority. Feeble-minded ideologues like Hitler and Goebbels had no trouble believing their own lies and spreading their hysteria to others like themselves.
The current global economic slump that has brought unemployment, homelessness, and lack of the basic necessities, including medical care, to so many people around the world is the result of a few individuals’ relentless profiteering and their constant movement of jobs and capital toward the areas of the world where the most gain can be realized at the cost of the suffering of others. Using dishonest mass media like the FoxNews, Breitbart, and other outlets of lies and misinformation, including Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, those who caused the global economic catastrophe set out to blame their misdeeds on others, including a variety of racial, ethnic, gender, religious, and other groups.
Did Mexicans take away the jobs of Americans? Did Muslims spread terrorism and violence around the world? Did immigrants ruin the good life in western countries? Most certainly not. America was built on the backs and hard labor of immigrants, Africans, Chinese, Mexicans, Irish, Filipinos, Vietnamese and many others. We owe a debt of gratitude to all of them. On the other hand, it was the likes of Donald Trump who exported American jobs to the hinterlands of misery where there are no government regulations or minimum wages. It was the world’s billionaires who have destroyed the environment and workers’ unions and who keep working-class people living in poverty and uncertainty. It was the American intelligence agencies that armed and trained fanatical religious extremists and put them up to do their dirty work. It is the oil industry and the weapons industry that keep the world in a state of constant and bloody warfare, indiscriminately murdering men, women and children and blaming it on others. It is the brutal disregard of the rich for the education and quality of life of common Americans that has made American cities and small towns alike into ghettos of filth, drug addiction and violence.
Who then should be held accountable for urban and rural squalor, global terrorism, chronic warfare, and mass unemployment? The answer is clear and unequivocal: it is Donald Trump himself and his fellow billionaires, politicians and business associates, including Charles and David Koch (Koch Industries), Richard and Betsy DeVos (Amway), Robert Mercer (Renaissance Technologies), Foster Friess (Friess Associates), and many others in the finance, oil and coal, armaments and defense, guns and pharmaceuticals, construction and chemicals, higher education and other industries that have gained from the losses of the public and who have done everything in their power to keep Americans ignorant and dispossessed, all along diverting the attention of the public away from themselves and toward scapegoats meant to carry the burden of their sins.
The rising waves of populism around the world are not unjustified. Working class people have indeed been victims of the evil schemes of those who thrive on their misery. What is lacking in the current political scene is the proper and accurate identification of the perpetrators of these crimes. Once that is done, the masses of the people should have no problem bringing their grievances to their doorway and demanding, and exacting, the due retribution.
Donald W. Shriver, President Emeritus, Union Theological Seminary, Holocaust Remembrance Day, 4/24/17
When you visit the Yadvashem memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem, they give you a pin shaped in the form of the Hebrew word for “remember.” There are two strong reasons for all of us to remember the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust: to honor the six million victims, and to warn each other that as humans we all are still tempted to imitate such past crimes in our presentday. We truly remember the Holocaust of the Jewish people when we defend the lives of people in our own time who are targets of hatred either in our own hearts or in the policies of our governments.