Florida bans Holocaust textbooks

The state of Florida has banned textbooks that focus on the Holocaust under Governor Ron Desantis’s censorship laws that politicize and corrupt the teaching of history in Florida. All of this is a type of sick performance theater — a grotesque kabuki. Ron DeSantis has made an assessment that the fastest way to climb the greasy pole all the way to the top and reach the MAGA throne room is by engaging in poisonous theatrics that have come to include censorship of books about the Holocaust.

Predictably, this has fueled the rise of a loathsome class of bottom-feeding politicians like DeSantis, who are seeking national office on the basis of the width of their toxic plume. Each day brings a bidding war of dishonesty, stupidity, idiocy, conspiracy theories, scapegoating, grievance, racism and demagoguery where Trump competes against his former sycophants. The result is a brewing fascism and rising extremism that threatens American society and democracy.

The Patriot Front marched in Washington, DC, on Mother’s Day. They were 200 strong, each a masked fascist. They are American Nazis who are seeking the overthrow  of the American republic and the US Constitution in favor of a white supremacist government. They are a part of the MAGA coalition, and have been mainstreamed by Donald Trump, who referred to them as being “very fine people” after the Charlottesville rally where the torch-carrying Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us.”

Patriot Front members carrying upside down American flags through Washington, DC, on May 14, 2023

Today, they number in the hundreds. They aspire to number in the tens of thousands, and then more. These people are domestic enemies who have sworn to destroy what our ancestors have built — the most tolerant, pluralistic, prosperous, technologically advanced, culturally dominant society in the history of human civilization, made up of all the peoples of the world united in common citizenship, equal under the rule of law and free. They are dangerous and ultimately lethal. They seek to burn down one of mankind’s greatest achievement, which is these United States of America.

Predictably, their focus and hatred mainly fall on three groups of Americans: Blacks, Jews and gays. These groups — and all fascist movements — always unveil themselves by revealing their embedded and distorted beliefs through their racial hatred and lies. The safest bet in the world is that Jew, Black and gay hatred will always manifest itself around any and every modern right-wing political movement. MAGA is no different. These vile people see themselves as Trump’s SA. They are his foot soldiers in an evil cause.

The Nazis planned the Holocaust during a 90-minute lunch meeting presided over by Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. Here is the house:

This is the place where the premeditated murder of more than 11 million people was planned with ruthless precision. When the tide and fortunes of war turned against Hitler and his regime they sought to cover up the crimes planned at Wansee, but the meticulous German record-keeping and physical evidence was too much.

Between January and May of 1945 hundreds of Nazi extermination and concentration camps were liberated by allied forces. Here are some of the images from Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau:

Here is a photo of the German civilians ordered into the camps to bear witness and bury the dead under the direct command of General Eisenhower:

An Austrian Jewish survivor explains to General Eisenhower and German civilians how the gallows were used in a camp

The Supreme Commander did three things upon viewing the camps. First, he ordered the German civilians from nearby towns into the camps. He made them face the atrocities that were committed in their name. Second, he ordered everything filmed. Third, he tried to bring as many government officials, civic leaders and journalists as possible through the camps because he knew that, one day, the crimes would be denied. I suspect he did not guess, at the time, that it would be the state of Florida pulling into the lead by 2023.

Among the lessons of the 1930s that should endure is that the contamination of young people through indoctrination is easily and quickly accomplished. The Nazi Party was a youth movement in many regards. The book burnings occurred on college campuses. They didn’t understand that they were burning their present and future down as well. In fact, they almost ended civilization.

The Holocaust is a singular event in human history, and it occurred within the life span of living human beings. There are still survivors of the camps amongst us, but soon their long lives will end. Their stories will become history as opposed to living memory. Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor, Nobel Laureate, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and one of the 20th century's greatest voices of moral conscience, spoke about the obligation of future generations to bear witness during an address to the United Nations commemorating Auschwitz on January 24, 2005. I believe that they are some of the most important words that have been spoken in the last 80 years. They are necessary words that speak to the urgent moral duty of remembering.

There is a new extremism rising, and it is happening in America. It is being led by men like Ron DeSantis. He is a book banner in America, and that is a vile thing to be. Here is why Florida school children deserve better than Holocaust censorship:

Bearing Witness, 60 Years On by Elie Wiesel

For the first time in the history of the  United Nations, the General Assembly commemorated  the victims of the Holocaust in a special session on  January 24, 2005. Speakers at the gathering, held three days before the 60th anniversary of the Allied   liberation of the Nazi death camps, included  Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, Russia's commissioner for  human rights Vladimir Lukin, and Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor whose writings  chronicle the Nazi horrors. Wiesel's remarks follow. 

Mr. President of the General Assembly,  Mr. Secretary-General my friend, excellencies: 

The man who stands before you this  morning feels deeply privileged. A teacher and  writer, he speaks and writes as a witness to a crime committed in the heart of European Christendom and civilization by a brutal dictatorial regime-a crime of unprecedented cruelty in which all segments of government participated 

When speaking about that era of  darkness, the witness encounters difficulties. His  words become obstacles rather than vehicles; he writes not with words but against words. For there are no words to describe what the victims felt when death was the norm and life a miracle. Still, whether you know it or not, his memory is part of yours. 

I speak to you as a son of an ancient people, the only people of antiquity to have survived antiquity, the Jewish people which, throughout much of its history, has endured exile  and oppression yet has never given up hope of redemption 

As a young adolescent, he saw what no human being should have to see: the triumph of political fanaticism and ideological hatred for those who were different. He saw multitudes of human beings humiliated, isolated, tormented, tortured, and murdered. They were overwhelmingly Jews but there were others. And those who committed these crimes were not vulgar underworld thugs but men with high government, academic, industrial, and medical positions in Germany. In recent years, that nation has become a true democracy. But the question remains open: In those dark years, what motivated so many brilliant and committed public servants to invent such horrors? By its scope and magnitude, by its sheer weight of numbers, by the impact of so much humiliation and pain, in spite of being the most documented tragedy in the annals of history, Auschwitz still defies language and understanding. 

Let me evoke those times: 

Babies used as target practice by SS men... Adolescents condemned never to grow old... Parents watching their children thrown into burning pits... Immense solitude engulfing an entire people... Infinite despair haunting our days and our dreams even 60 years later... 

When did what we so poorly call the Holocaust begin? In 1938, during Kristallnacht? In 1939 perhaps, when a German ship, the St. Louis, with more than a thousand German Jewish refugees aboard, was turned back from America's shores? Or was it when the first massacres occurred in Babi Yar? 

We still ask: What was Auschwitz: an end or a beginning, an apocalyptic consequence of centuries-old bigotry and hatred, or was it the final convulsion of demonic forces in human nature? 

A creation parallel to God's-a world with its own antinomian United Nations of people of different nationalities, traditions, cultures, socio-economic spheres, speaking many languages, clinging to a variety of faiths and memories. They were grown ups or young, but inside that world there were no children and no grandparents; they had already perished. 

As I have said many times: Not all victims were Jewish, but all Jews were victims. For the first time in recorded history to be Jewish became a crime. Their birth became their death sentence. Correction: Jewish children were condemned to die even before they were born. What the enemy sought to attain was to put an end to Jewish history; what he wanted was a new world implacably, irrevocably devoid of Jews. Hence Auschwitz, Ponar, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno and Sobibor: dark factories of death erected for the Final Solution. Killers came there to kill and victims to die. 

That was Auschwitz, an executioner's ideal of a kingdom of absolute evil and malediction with its princes and beggars, philosophers and theologians, politicians and artists, a place where to lose a piece of bread meant losing life, and a smile from a friend another day of promise. 

At the time, the witness tried to understand; he still does not: How was such calculated evil, such bottomless and pointless cruelty possible? Had Creation gone mad? Had God covered His face? A religious person cannot conceive of Auschwitz either with or without God. But what about man? How could intelligent, educated or simple law-abiding citizens fire machine guns at hundreds of children and their parents, and in the evening enjoy a cadence by Schiller, a partita by Bach? 

Turning point or watershed, that tremendous catastrophe which has traumatized history has forever changed man's perception of responsibility toward other human beings. The sad, terrible fact is that had the Western nations intervened when Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia and Austria; had America accepted more refugees from Europe; had Britain allowed more Jews to return to their ancestral land; had the Allies bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, our tragedy might have been avoided, its scope surely diminished. 

This shameful indifference we must remember, just as we must remember to thank the few heroic individuals who, like Raoul Wallenberg, risked their lives to save Jews. We shall also always remember the armies that liberated Europe and the soldiers who liberated the death-camps, the Americans in Buchenwald, the Russians in Auschwitz and the British in Belsen. But for many victims they all came too late. That we must also remember. 

When the American Third Army liberated Buchenwald, there was no joy in our heart: only pain. We did not sing, we did not celebrate. We had just enough strength to recite the Kaddish. 

And now, 60 years later, you who represent the entire world community, listen to the words of the witness. Like Jeremiah and Job, we could have cried and cursed the days dominated by injustice and violence. We could have chosen vengeance. We did not. We could have chosen hate. We did not. Hatred is degrading and vengeance demeaning. They are diseases. Their history is dominated by death. 

The Jewish witness speaks of his people's suffering as a warning. He sounds the alarm so as to prevent these things being done. He knows that for the dead it is too late; for them, abandoned by God and betrayed by humanity, victory came much too late. 

But it is not too late for today's children, ours and yours. It is for their sake alone that we bear witness. It is for their sake that we are duty-bound to denounce anti-Semitism, racism, and religious or ethnic hatred. Those who today preach and practice the cult of death, those who use suicide terrorism, the scourge of this new century, must be tried and condemned for crimes against humanity. Suffering confers no privileges; it is what one does with suffering that matters. Yes, the past is in the present, but the future is still in our hands. 

Those who survived Auschwitz advocate hope, not despair; generosity, not rancor or bitterness; gratitude, not violence. We must be engaged, we must reject indifference as an option. Indifference always helps the aggressor, never his victims. And what is memory if not a noble and necessary response to and against indifference? 

 But ...will the world ever learn?