Fear and loathing

I used to wonder how Nazism took hold. Learning about it in school forty years after the end of World War II, I couldn't fathom how people could do such things to each other. I now know it comes down to fear. We can get smothered in fear and then wear it like bravado to make us into proud monsters, striking at imagined enemies and each other.

Fear is the easy path, compared to the thorny way of reason. It’s easy to surrender to fear and make bold cowards of us all, cringing behind whomever has the loudest, angriest voice. We let the anger seep into us and fill our thoughts, because it becomes too difficult to puzzle out the answers on our own. It turns vigilance into paranoia. It makes good people commit murders, wars and genocides… and wonder for generations how we could do such horrible things to each other.

This all comes to mind because of Facebook, of all places. Several people I know are rather hardcore conservatives who have been enamored with Donald Trump and all his rhetoric of fear. The Nazi analogy should never be used lightly, but all of my life, I've heard the repeated warning from the Jewish survivors of World War II, that was must remain vigilant or something like Nazis ruling a country could happen again.

I have to admit, I had my doubts. After all, we're so enlightened now and we've gone through a world war to end the paranoid, megalomaniacal governments of the Axis. How could this ever happen again? Well, it hasn't, but we have to be wise to see the signs. 

The developed world is stepping on a slippery slope and is desperately trying to keep its footing. Terror groups are killing people en masse in the name of Islam, casting all Muslims into the spotlight of suspicion. The Muslims haven't been very overt in vetting out terrorists from their own ranks, so it has appeared to the infidels of the world that moderate Muslims are quietly allow this to happen, only coming out with support after the fact. They've had no great voice on the world stage (i.e., Martin Luther King, Jr. or Ghandi) to say "This is a horror and against the teachings of Islam -- and this is why..." followed by actual citations from the Koran that Muslims could grab onto and help them fight the extremists with doctrine. Kicking the religious leg out from under ISIS or any other such group might not weaken them very much, but it would go a long way to sway the non-Muslims in the developed world.

The reason I wrote about fear is because I've found myself afraid of what is going to happen if people like Trump keeping pumping fear and aggression into the minds of those already giving Muslims a sidelong-glace of suspicion. Something will happen. Something terrible. And if Trump, or someone as fearful and angry as he is, gets into the presidency, bad things could result on a global scale.

Once fear like the vague fear of xenophobia begin to take hold, horrors happen. Horrors like the Nazis performed. We wondered for generation how such things could happen -- how an entire nation could go insane, gleefully ostracizing and slaughtering people just because they have different beliefs or lifestyle. Yet, here we are with Donald Trump suggesting no Muslims be allowed into the United States. We interred Japanese in camps during World War II. How far have we really come from the Nazis? And the more years that are put between us and when Hitler put a bullet in his brain, are we more likely to repeat the horrors of the past on some other sub-culture within our own nation? Maybe. 

That's my fear. 

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