Dictators count on silence by Ruth Neuwald Falcon

I don’t know how old I was when I learned about Nazis. I don’t know how I was told, or even if I was told. Maybe I overheard them, my parents and my aunt, talking. Maybe I put together what they said with the pictures I saw in magazines left open in the bathroom. (There was always a stack of them on the hamper beside the toilet.) It feels to me that I always knew, but that can’t be true. There must have been a time before the nightmare of cruelty, brutality, and cold, dead eyes wasn’t a reality to me.

But maybe not. Maybe when you’re born into a family whose lives have been shattered by the unstopped effects of those things, you always know. In her book, Wounds Into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma, Rabbi Tirzah Firestone writes, “The field of epigenetics offers growing evidence that traumatic events can create a kind of ‘biological memory’ that emerges under stress.” So, maybe I did always know. And it’s certainly true that my ‘biological memory’ has been activated. Big time.

I spent most of my life wondering how people, decent people—for surely all the Germans and the Poles and the Hungarians, for starters—weren’t Nazis. How had they let it happen?

Well, now I’m getting to see how it happened.

We are a whisper away from it no longer being possible to stop the nightmare from completely taking over our country. I understand the impulse to turn away, to not “pay attention to the news,” as if the news were something out there that doesn’t touch all our lives. We had the luxury of not really needing to pay attention—unless we were Black or brown or gay or trans or a member of another minority—for a long time. True, there were occasions that got us out of our personal ruts and ignited political involvement—firehosing people in Birmingham got folks’ attention. So did napalming the jungles and villages of Vietnam and gunning down four students at Kent State. We woke up for Rodney King and were roused by the sight of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.

But as horrific and imperfect as things have been in the past, we have never before, in this country, faced the complete corruption and lawlessness of the people and institutions sworn to uphold the law. Today, as reported by the AP, “a large banner featuring Donald Trump’s face was hung on the exterior of Justice Department headquarters… which amounted to a striking symbol of the erosion of the department’s tradition of independence from White House control.” If you want to see a chilling sight, one that confirms all my worst fears as a child of the Holocaust, take a look at the first photograph running with the AP story. It tells us everything we need to know about what is happening.

But here’s the problem. There are way too many people who are not looking. They don’t want to see the teargassed children, or know about the two-month-old baby choking on its own vomit in a Texas detention center, or the 4th and 5th graders running from their school bus stop in fear of ICE agents. They don’t want to know about the growing network of what Rachel Maddow calls “legal black sites” around the country.

I want to scream from the rooftops. Pay attention! We are in mortal danger. Say something. Do something. I know what can happen. I know what this kind of authoritarianism does to the populace of a nation. Its brutality will not bypass anyone. Keeping your head down won’t work indefinitely. Your world is already getting smaller. You are already guarding your tongue, being careful about who you say what to. If there are masked gunmen murdering people with impunity a year into this regime, what do you think will happen in another year? And who do you think they’re going to put into those huge black sites when they’ve finished pretending that this is all about illegal immigration?

Robert Hubbell wrote yesterday:

“We live in a fraught moment in which we have three choices for responding to Trump’s attempt to end democracy: capitulation, remaining silent, or raising our voices. In reality, there are only two choices because capitulation and remaining silent are the same (italics mine). Both advance Trump’s agenda, even though they involve different degrees of cooperation. But, in the end, dictators count on most people shrinking into the shadows. When good people remain silent, it becomes easier for the dictator to target those who raise their voices.”

It is up to us. As Hubbell keeps reminding us: This will stop when enough of us say, “No.”