Never forget. Racists always claim Nazi violence was provoked. They always blame the victims for defending themselves against fascism. And they eventually always try to equate anti-fascist protesters with the Nazis themselves. It’s a white supremacist recipe as old as time. It permeates their world, from government policies to pop culture to the statements of their vapid cultural icons.
On the night of November 9, 1938, violence against Jews broke out across the Reich. It appeared to be unplanned, set off by Germans' anger over the assassination of a German official in Paris at the hands of a Jewish teenager.
Kristallnacht… In the immediate aftermath of the pogrom, many German leaders, like Hermann Göring, criticized the extensive material losses produced by the antisemitic riots… The German government made an immediate pronouncement that “the Jews” themselves were to blame for the pogrom and imposed a fine of one billion Reichsmark (some 400 million US dollars at 1938 rates) on the German Jewish community.
By the mid-1930s, Coughlin had become a vocal critic of the Roosevelt administration, and he attacked Jews explicitly in his broadcasts. In the days and weeks after Kristallnacht, Coughlin defended the state-sponsored violence of the Nazi regime, arguing that Kristallnacht was justified as retaliation for Jewish persecution of Christians.
When Musburger was just a young sportswriter covering the 1968 Olympics, he authored a profoundly racist article for a newspaper called the Chicago American. The enduring image of the 1968 games is undeniable: the gold and bronze-winning sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, two Black American men at the pinnacle of their crafts, raising their gloved fists high aloft in a Black Power salute as they stood on the medal podium… [Brent] Musburger referred to Smith and Carlos as “Black-skinned storm troopers,” drawing a direct comparison between them and Nazi soldiers.
And then there’s Melania Trump’s comments on the NeoNazi death threats sent to a Jewish Journalist who profiled her in GQ:
She provoked them
She provoked the death threats by writing an article.
Anti-fascist protesters provoked their own death by protesting fascism.
We know what this is.
We’ve seen it many times before.
And we must all continue to Resist. And even once we believe we’ve won, we must never forget and we must never stop Resisting, because:
The Rosenstrasse protest… The protests by these intermarried German women continued until the men were released. It was the only continuous street demonstration by Germans against the deportation of the Jews… On 5 March 1943, the SS sent in trucks with machine guns to threaten the women on the Rosenstrasse, but despite the menace of the machine guns aimed at them and the threat to gun them all down, the women remained… On 6 March 1943, Goebbels in his capacity as the Gauleiter of Berlin ordered all of the people imprisoned at Rosenstrasse 2-4 released… As the Jews were released from the Rosenstrasse 2-4, they were warned by the Gestapo that this was not the end, and to enjoy their moment of freedom while it lasted, because they would be coming for them again.