Bishop Anthony B. Taylor
Bishop Anthony B. Taylor issued this statement Jan. 24 on polarization and partisanship in today’s world.
My grandfather lost 20 first cousins in the Holocaust, and so I admittedly tend to view troubling things in today’s world through the lens of 1930s Germany.
Lest anyone dismiss the remainder of my statement as hyperbolic, I want to be clear that the current times are not identical, and Trump is no Hitler. But the moral decline of our country is real. And we are doomed to repeat failures of the past if we are not willing to remember them and learn from them. Polarization and partisanship are poisoning the social fabric of our country. In this, there are many obvious parallels with the 1930s, and that should give us pause.
In Hitler, Germany had an eloquent speaker who was able to tap into the understandable fears and anger of people in the wake of the country’s catastrophic losses in World War I and the financial meltdown at the end of the 1920s. These people longed for their beloved homeland to be great once again, and many disaffected people resonated with Hitler’s talk of “real” Germans, the Aryan race, and his mockery and demonization of those who were different racially or religiously or didn’t share his views.
In the 1930s, Germany’s democracy was still young, its checks and balances insufficient, and its politicians too quick to go along with whatever direction the leadership pushed for — without critical thought or pushback. Those political opponents who did dare to oppose Hitler were silenced, initially through intimidation and threats, and eventually by being shipped off to Dachau and other concentration camps.
The first Nazi concentration camp was for political opponents and other leaders in society, and it especially targeted those who resisted Hitler’s agenda. Fear of arrest and fear of Hitler’s thugs — the SA or “Brownshirts” — silenced many who disagreed privately with the direction their society was headed. In that decade, German society moved away from respect for human dignity, peace and moral restraint.
I fear that the same dynamics are now happening in our country with the decline of civil discourse.
More: https://x.com/dcosacchi/status/2015926824971198611?s=46&t=IydJ-X8H6c0NM044nYKQ0w
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