70 years passed between the end of WWII and the time when it apparently became ok to walk around in the US openly as a Nazi. Those Americans who fought in WWII and grew up in the Great Depression are known as the “Greatest Generation.” Sadly, very few of them are still with us, but I have to ask myself, what would people like my grandparents have thought of this situation in which they triumphed over a the Nazis only to see a US president elected who is directly linked to people who make statements such as this:
Mr. Spencer’s after-dinner speech began with a polemic against the “mainstream media,” before he briefly paused. “Perhaps we should refer to them in the original German?” he said.
The audience immediately screamed back, “Lügenpresse,” reviving a Nazi-era word that means “lying press.”
Mr. Spencer suggested that the news media had been critical of Mr. Trump throughout the campaign in order to protect Jewish interests. He mused about the political commentators who gave Mr. Trump little chance of winning.
A few years after the end of WWII, the US became global rivals with the Soviet Union, and the Cold War began. Republican Senator Joe McCarthy ruthlessly investigated prominent Americans for suspicious ties to Russia and the Communist Party (pointlessly destroying many lives). If he could have held on for another 60 years in the Senate, he would be shocked to find today ties between Trump’s intelligence advisers, campaign officials, and perhaps, Trump himself, and Russia, and that Russia intervened on behalf of his party’s candidate.
To paraphrase Simon and Garfunkel:
‘Where are you, Joe McCarthy-o, a nation turns it’s lonely eyes to you.’
I’m in my thirties and not quite yet old, but I find it interesting how society’s fears and reactions to certain things once considered horrifying or evil can completely shift over time. Certainly as little as a decade ago there would have been enough people with a long enough memory to produce a much sharper response to some of these events, I am quite sure. But now the response seems surprisingly muted. Maybe it is good that the human mind and the passing of the torch to new generations allows historic traumas to fade from the human memory, but maybe we should hold on to some particularly instructive ones a little longer? I would be interested to hear others’ thoughts as well.