I have been bingeing on “The Man in the High Castle” on Amazon Prime.* The Nazis won World War II and, after dropping an A-Bomb on DC, established the Reich in the eastern part of our country while the Japanese had the western.
If you can suspend your knowledge of history a bit and enter this alternate reality, it becomes very frightening. The Japanese are despotic with a vengeance but it is the Nazi government, white supremacy personified, that is the most striking to me.
Swastikas are everywhere in one form or the other, Heil Hitler and Sieg Heil ring out, the less than ‘perfect’ human specimens are euthanized, the brown-shirted young people stand with the Nazi salute, on and on.
Normally, such a story, similar in tone to Phillip Roth’s “The Plot Against America”, would just be fascinating fiction. But consider Charlottesville, Virginia in the Summer of 2017. White nationalists marched on the University of Virginia campus. Counter protestors gathered. Chaos ensued with violence, the worst of which was the death of young anti-Nazi protester when a white supremacist drove his car into the crowd.
New American Nazis represent the absolute worst of racism and anti-Semitism. They must be taken seriously. Never, for even a moment, think like Trump that there is “good” amongst them. History, if we could only learn from it, is clear about that danger.
Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, wrote: “We have seen” (referring to the Holocaust) the mounds of corpses and visited the camps where they killed us. . . . By our sides were the ghosts of those who were no longer, whose blood was shed like water because Jewish blood is considered cheap. We saw their outstretched hands and looked into their burning and soul-searing eyes that peered into our very being and heard them say: Never again. Promise us. Never again”
If ever there was a time to renew this promise, the time is now.
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*This series is based on a Philip K. Dick book, one of 44 published novels and approximately 121 short stories. Dick died much too early at age 53. That he was so prolific and creative was a gift to the world nonetheless.
Words from Warren 
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