Here's a historical video of prisoners found when the Allies arrived at the Nazi concentration camps in Germany, in 1945.
As a taxi driver in the Huntington Beach area, from 2003-2007, I spent all day in my cab. I actually lived in my taxi most of that time, so I was in the car 22 hours a day, or more, usually working 14-18 hours, and sleeping a few. In those days before smartphones and wifi and streaming everything, I listened to the radio much of the time. Standard music stations get old real fast when you spend that much time in a car, so I listened to KPFK, a listener-sponsored station from L.A.. They had a wide variety of programing, mostly left leaning news, and local L.A. news shows in the morning, and interview shows and various music shows at other times.
KPFK is not a public funded radio station, and it's not part of NPR. It's one of five stations in the U.S. that are part of the Pacifica radio network, which goes back to 1949, up in Berkeley, California. They are all funded almost entirely by listener donations. It was, and is, basically a radio network built by activists. But it has a wide variety of different programs, and a lot of them have smart people to listen to, unlike ratings based talk radio, and pop music stations. Since they go back to 1949, Pacifica also has an incredible archive of recordings, ranging from famous political speeches from decades ago, to interviews with well known people over 50 years, to music like Billie Holiday sing "Strange Fruit" live. Once in a while show hosts dive into the immense Pacifica Radio Archives to find historical recordings, for a show.
One day they played an interview with a woman who was a young girl of 8 or 9, when the Nazis took over Germany, in the 1930's. It was an interview recorded in the 1960's or 1970's, I believe. The part of that interview that stuck with me was the woman talking about when she first realized something was really wrong with her country then. Her family lived in Berlin, and one day they drove into the city, and she said she noticed that the homeless people we all gone. There were several homeless people they would drive by in certain areas, and overnight, they had all disappeared.
What really struck this young girl then was that none of the adults said anything about it. They all pretended that it hadn't happened. The woman being interviewed, remembering back to that time as a girl, said that day was the day she sensed something really bad was going on, but it took quite a while to figure it out, because no one was talking about the things happening, like the homeless people all disappearing overnight.
It was quite a while before the stories of Jews, Gypsies, political dissidents, intellectuals, gays, and other groups being rounded up began to creep through German society. Today, primarily because of the 6 million Jews and others murdered in the camps, we know of the atrocities, and least some of them, that went on. But the woman in that interview said the homeless people were the first group to disappear, and no adult said a thing. Later Germans believed they were the first people taken to the concentration camps, and executed.
In this crazy time of 2020, dealing with a pandemic, and some people in our government who seem bent on a drive towards authoritarianism, and in particular, the recent abductions of Americans recorded by unmarked commandos in unmarked white vans, I was reminded of the woman's story I heard on the radio, 15 or so years ago. As the saying goes, "Those who don't learn from history, are destined to repeat it."
Will we let the United States of American, this grand experiment in democracy, end, and devolve into a horrific dictatorship? Time will tell. Authoritarian regimes don't take control, they are given control by people living in fear. We are making many of the same mistakes the Germans made. How far will we let things decline? Hopefully not much farther.
Legend has it that people outside Independence Hall, in 1787, asked Ben Franklin what kind of country the leaders inside had crafted. Franklin reportedly replied, "A republic, if you can keep it." I, personally, want to keep it. What about you?
No comments:
Post a Comment