When the Oppressed Side With Their Oppressors
You know that line from the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes about how there’s nothing new under the sun? Students of history get that feeling all the time. It’s because people refuse to learn anything from history, so they keep falling into the same deadly traps. As the “alternate history” novelist Harry Turtledove observed recently, whatever learning from the past people do manage to acquire, seems to be limited to things that happened in their own lifetimes. That certainly helps explain why we are locked into this path of farce/fascism a scant eighty years after the world’s last near-death experience with it — just long enough for the last survivors of the World War II era to be dying out.
As before, so again now. And that applies to the crazy-making phenomenon of a few members of the very groups targeted by the farce/fascists offering their loud support to those who wish them nothing but harm. What on earth goes through the mind of Trump advisor Stephen Miller and French politician Eric Zemmour, Jews who stand for vicious crackdowns on immigrants in the U.S. and France, respectively? Do they imagine that the sort of people who cheer on their demonization of Latinos and Muslims want a lot of Jews in their neighborhoods–and that they don’t wish America and France had been kept Jew-free altogether?
