Kristallnacht II

This week was a week like no other I have experienced in my adult life, and it will be hard to fully capture all of the swirling events in a single blog post.  But I will pick out a few observations that I think are relevant to the discussion.

As we know, Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass, occurred on November 9 and 10, 1938 when Nazis torched Jewish businesses, synagogues, homes and schools, killed about 100 Jews and arrested some 30,000 Jews and sent them to concentration camps.  This week, in New York, DC, Chicago, Minneapolis, NY, and many other cities, looters went on a rampage following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.  With elements of Antifa mixed in, mobs trashed, burned and looted for days, turning New York into something out of a futuristic dystopian sci-fi film. 

Most revolting was that the looters clearly had targeted symbolic edifices.  Kristallnacht II was much wider.  Jews were a subset of the repression this time around.  Churches and synagogues were looted and defaced.  In Chicago, a church was vandalized, a Catholic bookstore was looted and in LA a Jewish neighborhood was targeted for destruction.  Ironically, in New York, police were dispatched to close down Jewish funeral and on the very day of the rioting, Jewish moms and kids were shooed off of a playground.  That same night, no police officers were in sight as Macy’s was trashed and looted.

In addition to religious symbols, the mob defaced American symbols.  The Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, and the College Football Hall of Fame.  They even vandalized the memorial to the 54^th Massachusetts , the statue of Gandhi, and Winston Churchill in Great Britain.  Virginia is taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee, but you know it won’t stop there.  Washington and Jefferson will be next.

NPR posted a message that we need to “de-colonize our bookshelves, actively resisting and casting aside the colonialist ideas of narrative, storytelling, and literature that have pervaded the American psyche for so long.”  Out with Gordon Wood.  In with the 1619 Project.  Our with Emerson, Thoreau and James Fenimore Cooper.  In with Ta Nehisi Coates.  If you object, you are a racist, a bigot, a xenophobe. 

Perhaps no other symbol carries more meaning than the mask, which we have been all forced to wear for months.  Dehumanizing, suffocating, it serves many purposes.  Under the guise of a barrier to pathogen transmission, it removes your individuality.  It makes it harder to breathe.  It makes it more difficult to talk.  They want you gagged and suffocated. 

This is how you know that this is not a protest.  It’s an attempt at a hostile takeover.  They go for symbols and intend to eradicate America’s glorious past completely. 

It began gradually a long time ago, but has picked up momentum with George Floyd as the accelerant. Prayer in schools was the first to go, then the pledge of allegiance.  What started with sex education morphed into Drag Queen Story Hour.  Study of the Declaration of Independence was replaced by LGBT history.  Instead of honoring the American flag at sporting events, the NFL will now defile it.   All of this is  is happening at a much faster, much more violent clip now.

ISIS and Al Qaeda knew the power of symbols.  ISIS destroyed precious, irreplaceable Buddhist statues.  Al Qaeda famously went for the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  What we are seeing now is no different.