I am old enough to have studied history long before the State of Texas was able to hijack the publishing industry and rewrite the textbooks to propagandize their fundamentalist right-wing agenda.
But though I read history texts untainted by Texans back in the 60s, I never really grasped, at a gut level, how Germany could have fallen prey to the Nazi plague. After all, most of my ancestors are German, and their descendants are the salt of the earth.
My contemporary German relatives are God-fearing Midwesterners who say grace before they devour their homemade chicken and noodles. They don’t just pass away. When they write their obituaries, they enter into the arms of their savior or ride the wings of an angel up to the heavens.
These are decent folk who keep clean homes. They don’t cheat on their taxes (though they’ve been known to cheat on their wives), and they are frugal to a fault.
Still, at worst my German ancestors participated in one of the most vile movements in the history of the civilized world. At best, they simply ignored atrocities carried out in their name.
How could they have bought into a movement so evil?
Plainly and simply, they were angry, afraid, and looking for someone to blame for their diminished status after their economy was devastated by World War I. Pretty much like what we see going on in the U.S. these days.
Which makes me wary of what lies ahead as I watch the anger of the Tea Party foment into a combustible stew poised to lash out at the most convenient scapegoat they can find. Their target is always The Other, just as the Nazis scapegoated the Jews.
Today’s Tea Party targets are Brown or Black, most often, and practicing an unfamiliar religion that has been demonized by politicians in the War On Terror, which is just a euphemism for empire-building, theft of natural resources on another continent, and reducing labor here and abroad to a cheap commodity.
God help us all.
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