Can Hate Ever Be Conquered?
April 12, 1945: Generals Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley at Ohrdruf
On April 4, 1945, soldiers of the 4th Armored Division entered and liberated Ohrdruf, a subcamp of the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. What they discovered was far worse than anything from Dante’s Inferno: piles of bodies, some covered with lime, and others partially incinerated on pyres. The ghastly nature of their discovery led General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, to visit the camp on April 12, with Generals George S. Patton and Omar Bradley. After his visit, Eisenhower cabled General George C. Marshall, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, describing his trip to Ohrdruf: the things I saw beggar description. … The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick ... . I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.” (Today, Eisenhower’s words are etched on a plaque which hands outside the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.)
Eisenhower also ordered every soldier who had a camera to snap as many photographs as possible, as a way to begin documenting the horror they found. Further, on April 19, 1945, Eisenhower again cabled General Marshall with a request to bring members of Congress and journalists to the newly liberated camps so that they could convey the horrible truth about Nazi atrocities to the American public. Within days, congressional representatives, senators and journalists began arriving to bear witness to Nazi crimes in the camps. The discovery of the Ohrdruf camp, and the subsequent liberation of Dora-Mittelbau (April 11), Flossenbürg (April 23), Dachau (April 29), and Mauthausen (May 5) opened the eyes of many US soldiers and the American public to the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Without question, the Holocaust was - and is - the most thoroughly documented act of mass murder - the product of irrational hatred - in all human history. And yet, despite the tens of millions of photos and films, the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and survivors who provided eye-witness testimony and all the German citizens and soldiers that Eisenhower forced to see what had been done in their name - there are those who believe with all their hearts (and to this very day) that the Holocaust never happened . . . that it was all a heinous fabrication on the part of the very people who claimed that they were its victims.
Indeed, Anti-Semitism - the irrational hatred of Jews - seems to be of greater antiquity than the religion or people themselves. It has forced more than one wit to wonder what came first: Jews or Anti-Semites. There are times one satirically wonders if G-d, in Co’s (my pronoun which is gender infinite) divine wisdom had not created the Jews, then the devil would have in order to have an eternal object of hatred and obloquy. Certainly groundless hatred is as old as the world itself. Witness the Biblical enmity between Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, as well as Jacob and Esau. Over several millennia, these hatreds expanded to the point where any people or group who was seen as being different - possessing “otherness” - became the object of scorn and derision as well as the source and cause of whatever was wrong or incomprehensible. Got a plague spreading across your continent? Blame the Jews for poisoning all the water wells. Suffering from a devastating economic downturn? Blame and punish the immigrants for stealing jobs and creating crime, or what today we refer to as the LGBTQ community for forcing the hand of the Lord and inflicting us with Divine wrath because of their “immoral” lifestyle. Suffer a devastating surprise attack by foreign fanatics? Turn every member of that group - whether be members of a particular country, culture or religion - into a collective, conspiratorial force of ultimate evil.
Read between the lines; you get the point.
We all know that hate crimes, incidences of violence against Jews, Muslims, African Americans, Hispanics and members of the LGBTQ community are at an all-time high. Groups which track these events and the groups behind them - such as the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center - provide chilling statistical evidence of this rise. It’s gotten to the point that just as soon as one act of lethal hate-provoked violence becomes front page, top-of-the-hour news, another comes along to replace it. This past Wednesday, a lone gunman mowed down 9 people at 2 different shisha (hookah) bars in Hanau, Germany. The suspect and his mother were later found dead of gunshot wounds in his apartment. This is the 3rd mass killing in Germany so far this year. Attacks have likewise taken the lives of Jews, Muslim immigrants and members of the LGBTQ community in the United States, England, France, Italy and other countries since the beginning of 2020.
Responses to these murderous attacks include public vigils with plenty of prayers, placards and flowers, calls for new gun legislation (especially in the United States), finger-pointing . . . attempts at ascertaining just what or whom is most likely responsible for the startling upsurge in violence, hatred and intolerance. And while pointing a fist and finger at a president, prime minister, political party or economic inequality are all understandable, they are largely of the “full of sound and fury signifying nothing” variety. Attempting to assign blame - social networking sites and the “dark web,” too many guns which are too easily obtained, a serious lack of education, etc., does little more than permit people to vent, which is not altogether a bad thing, However, to attempt to understand and ameliorate that which is inherently incomprehensible solves nothing. Trying to change the mind of a bigot, racist, homophobe, Islamophobe or Anti-Semite by providing facts, statistics or slices of history is next to useless. It is akin to banging one’s head against the wall which, so far as I know, produces little save concussions and cracked skulls. The bigot, the racist, the homphobe and other such such cretinous blots on society all suffer from a disease called certitude, which as Mr. Justice Holmes noted long ago in a 1897 Harvard Law Review essay, “generally is illusion . . . is not certainty. We have [all] been cocksure of many things that never were . . .”
Having expressed quite a bit of negativity, is there, in truth, anything which we - who are neither inherently bigoted, systemically violent nor willfully ignorant - can do to help stem the tide of hatred? Without slipping into the netherworld of idealistic innocence, there are a few suggestions to be made:
Always keep close at hand the names, phone numbers and email addresses of those organizations and/or individuals to whom we must report acts or threats of hatred. Shining a bright light upon the merchants of mendacity can have a sanitizing effect.
Be in constant contact with your elected officials . . . we must all be their eyes and ears.
Make sure to work and vote for those who share your worldview, your humanity and your outrage. Do not, under any circumstances decide to stay home and not vote because you don’t think it will make a difference.
Attend marches, vigils and meetings; if nothing else, to meet and get to know like-minded individuals.
Never give up.
When my sister Erica and I were toddlers, our Grannie Annie used to read us poems at bedtime. One of the most memorable was Keep ‘a Going by the American poet Frank Lebby Stanton (1857-1927), which said in part:
If you strike a thorn or rose,
Keep a-goin'!
If it hails or if it snows,
Keep a-goin'!
'Taint no use to sit an' whine
When the fish ain't on your line;
Bait your hook an' keep a-tryin'--
Keep a-goin'!
So, is it possible for hatred to ever be conquered? Don’t know for sure. But one thing I do know was taught to us by our beloved grandma:
KEEP -A-GOIN’!
255 days until the Presidential election.
Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone