There's no such thing as isolated incidents in history...

My November is turning out to be just as inter-culturally and inter-religiously diverse as October was: Last weekend I attended the final 2017 meeting of the Michigan Professional Communicators with interest in religion and cross-cultural issues (MPC), a panel discussion about race relations in Detroit, and a panel presentation by two Filipino adoptees about their experiences growing up in white American households and then going on successful quests as adults to find their birth families in the Philippines.

The first of these events I’ll dive into is the MPC meeting, which was held at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. This choice of venue was lauded by participants as very timely and apropos given the recent national rise in anti-Semitism, and in ignorant people’s sentimentality for (and defense of) Confederate, Nazi, and other oppressive symbolism from our not-so-distant past.

For the first hour of our gathering, the docent gave us an abridged version of the standard tour, presenting us with an excellent, concise accounting of the main points about how the Nazis were really able to develop enough power to do what they did—for years without anyone really interfering.

I was astounded that, nearly three-quarters of a century after the end of World War II, our society still lives with eerie parallels to the experiences of Germany and its neighbor-states leading up to the rise of the Nazis—and how ignorant most people are of these alarming warning signs.

We fail to see them only because of the surface-level differences: It’s so easy to say that our nation is too powerful (in contrast with the defeat and destabilization that left Germany wide-open for an authoritarian political coup in the years after World War I) or enlightened to ever allow such people to come to power again in the West; but the truth is that there’s nothing random about our current increases in authoritarian religion, authoritarian politics, mass shootings, terrorist infiltrations, human trafficking, institutional-level anti-Semitism, and so on.

Such people have never sprung up in a vacuum, and there’s nothing “senseless” or “pure” about their evil.

In her book My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past, Jennifer Teege makes the point that dehumanizing Nazis—or any genocidal hate group for that matter—means we deny responsibility that humans could even be capable of such cruelty. As a misguided form of self-defense, we try to rationalize such experiences instead of think critically about what collective karma contributed to this, and thus identify ways to help prevent that thinking—and those actions—from coming back again.

Instead, we have been taught to disregard and dismiss Nazis as freaks and move on, instead of acknowledging their movement and their actions as symptoms of a much-larger and still-existent problem. We contribute to their re-creation every time we choose such dismissal over honest reflection about the true state of our society—every time we label current politicians and mass shooters and berserk police-officers as random freaks, who should be ignored or quarantined in the hopes that the larger problems they represent will just go away.

After contemplating what I learned last Friday, one thing I realized is that whatever I was taught about the rise of the Nazis and the resulting Holocaust when I was a child was not enough, and I clearly wasn’t old enough to truly understand it as part of the larger context of human experience.

Childhood education gives the impression that large historical narratives such as the rise and fall of the Nazis were isolated incidents in history, instead of as part of a continuum of living history, that hasn’t just abruptly ended to create a new volume of humanity’s evolution.

Recent events have shown that we’re still in the same book we were 70-plus years ago, if not in the same chapter.

Education about long-term historical movements should not stop with grade or even high school, which is why I’m so glad there are such institutions giving tours like this, and organizations such as the Interfaith Leadership Council (IFLC) hosting diversity-and-inclusion educational events for adults. Now that we’re old enough to understand it in its context, my vision is that, this time around, we finally own that because we as a species created this kind of evil, we have the power to stop it.

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Image: "Interfaith Collective 2" by Karla Joy Huber, 2008 and 2015, Prismacolor and Sharpie marker