There are many dates we find significant.
July 4th, 1776. December 7th, 1941. November 22nd, 1963. July 20th, 1969. September 11th, 2001.
I doubt more than one in a hundred would remember the significance of November 9th, 1935. I didn’t know it myself — except for the year — until I looked it up.
It was the date Adolf Hitler and the Nazis left little doubt as to their ultimate goals. It was called Kristallnacht, known in English as the Night of Broken Glass. The excuse the Nazis used for it was calling it a spontaneous reaction to the assassination of a minor embassy official in Paris by a Polish Jew.
Hitler blamed the Jews for the damage and indeed fined them the equivalent of $400 million dollars (in 1938 dollars). In addition, 30,000 Jewish men were incarcerated and sent to Dachau, Buchenwald and other concentrations camps.
What’s the significance, what’s the connection to 2024 America?
Well, there’s this fellow named Donald Trump …
He isn’t Adolf Hitler … at least not yet. But I’m not sure there has ever been an American president who speaks more lovingly of violence. At his rallies when he was running for office in 2016, he encouraged his followers to treat protesters roughly and said he would pay their legal fees if they were arrested.
As soon as he was president, he began attacking Muslims and trying to ban them from entering the country. In fact, one of the tenets of Protect 2025, which Trump is desperately lying and trying to distance himself from, would mandate exactly that.
In his yammering about undocumented immigrants, he often denies them even their humanity, saying they are “vicious animals” and worse. He attacks his opponent by calling her “mentally deficient” and saying his 2020 opponent is completely senile.
Earlier this month, he made a statement reminiscent both of the Nazis with Kristallbacht and recent movies called “The Purge.” In each, those in power have a certain length of time in which they can do whatever they want regardless of the law.
Trump suggested that if there were a 12-hour period in which police could do whatever they wanted to criminals,
America would. be a much better place.
Well, it would be a very different place.
Germany without the umlauts.