Newsweek - Stephen B. Jacobs has a warning from the past for America today: It’s happening again.
At 79 years old he is among the youngest of the living Holocaust survivors and was born six years after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. But Jacobs can remember life in the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald; what the Nazis did to him, his family, his friends.
He worries about what’s happening right now in America, where he has lived and prospered since arriving a couple of years after Buchenwald’s liberation on April 11, 1945.
The American far-right appears emboldened since the election of President Donald Trump, who led an inflammatory, nationalist campaign. Since then, clashes like the one in Charlottesville are becoming almost commonplace.
Perhaps more alarming than the far-right getting braver is the seep into mainstream politics of their hate, their talking points, their rhetoric. “It feels like 1929 or 1930 Berlin,” Jacobs speculated, ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day 2018 on Thursday.
...In Trump, Jacobs says, the far-right sees an “enabler.”
“I’m involved with New York real estate, I know this man personally,” says Jacobs, whose eponymous architecture firm celebrated its 50th birthday in 2017. “Trump is an enabler. Trump has no ideas. Trump is out for himself.
“He’s a sick, very disturbed individual. I couldn’t say that Trump is a fascist because you’ve got to know what fascism is. And I don’t think he has the mental power to even understand it.”
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3 comments:
According to Stephen B. Jacobs America has not learned from history. He speaks about his experiences coming up in Hitler regime, and fears he sees a similar embolden behavior among the alt-right group. I get the sense that Stephen sees America moving backward, in an old unpopular way of doing things, as Hitler and Germans are quite embarrassed by this era of theirs in history. One can hope we don't come to make an even better stain in history.
Count among the emboldened Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe, who suggests that Palestinians accept their diaspora as part of history's course.
Jacoby has never been other than a grossly-overpaid troll.
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