In the most consequential election in our lifetimes, voting against Trump Republicans is the only path ... by gimleteye

The Miami-Dade Republican Party’s County Chairman led an angry mob of partisans, alongside the local leader of national hate group the Proud Boys, in an attack on a Democratic campaign office this week. Miami GOP Chairman Nelson Diaz planned the event (image below) and local Congressman Carlos Curbelo publicized the protest heavily, before and after. (From The Stern Facts)

I'm in Poland, at the end of a pilgrimage in family geography I'd never done in my 64 fortunate years. I'm a first generation American and owe a deep allegiance to the values of democracy and a nation, that allowed my immigrant parents to work hard and to prosper, to educate their children and finally to provide the life that billions around the world dream of. Such are the privileges of the United States.

My family's beginnings were not promising. My father was born in 1922 in a poor, minor city on the edge of Hungary and Romania. The region was deep into decades of hatred and persecution of "the other" -- Jews -- despite the fact that Hungarian Jews in the first Great War had been loyal supporters of the ruling elite. They could never imagine their allegiance would be betrayed by their own.

In 1944, when the Axis cause of the Second World War was already lost, Hitler launched his full fury against the Hungarian Jews. In two short months, nearly three quarters of a million were exported from ghettos where Jews had been herded into concentration camps. What followed, the mass exterminations of the Holocaust, never happened in the history of human civilization.

In May 1994, my paternal grandmother and grandfather were loaded into a train of freight cars. They arrived in Auschwitz a month later. (I know these facts because the Nazis kept detailed records including dates.)

The trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau should have taken a few days, but by the summer of 1944, the rails were jammed with human freight. Birkenau was the bright spot in the Nazi imagination. It was bursting with over 100,000 prisoners warehoused in stables designed for horses. The main limitation was water. The Nazis left the sanitary clean up to the administration of prisoners, saving for themselves the process of decontamination in order to prevent the contraction of typhus and other communicable diseases among themselves, the superior race.

At the train station, children were forcibly separated from mothers. Nazi doctors separated out older women with the children, and they were herded straight to the death chambers. They were stripped naked, shaved and showered in freezing or scalding hot water. They were then sent to death chambers. From slots in the roof above, Nazi soldiers dropped insecticide canisters into the sealed chambers. Today the evidence is stacked in displays of a small fraction of possessions left behind with the concentration camp was liberated by the Soviets in 1945.

Shoes collected from the murdered, a small fraction, at Auschwitz-Birkenau

The Nazis were efficient. They wanted to economize on the cost of killing. The less they spent on the toxin Zyklon-B, the better. So instead of poisoning their prisoners quickly, they determined that 15-20 minutes was an appropriate duration for murder.

The death chamber in Auschwitz was built early in the war, above ground. The screams of the dying were unpleasant. When the Nazis built Birkenau a few years later, they redesigned the death system and constructed underground chambers to muffle the screams of the dying. More than 1.1 million were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Nazis built an ingenious elevator system to move the bodies above ground to be burned. It was easier to kill than to dispose of the victims. The bottleneck was not the killing. It was the burning. And so the rail lines filled with cars of Jews, denied toilets and ventilation, offered only enough water and food to stay alive, stretched far back into the former lands of the Austro Hungarian empire. All to ensure the evidence would be efficiently removed.

So here is what the Holocaust has to do with the upcoming election in the United States.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party have given full throat to fear of "the other". This inchoate anger is never far from the imagination -- especially among the uneducated. In the United States, it is a constant low-gurgle of racists who resent African Americans, homosexuals, and minorities. In my lifetime, this was always a fringe element occasionally sparking. Until now.

Donald Trump has a single talent: an instinct for the passion of the lowest common denominator. He embraced white nationalism, or more accurately, transactional nationalism. He has given legitimacy to the fury of the mob, the grievances of those left behind by globalism, in order to hold off the shock and outrage of the majority who denied him their vote in 2016. Hitler similarly concentrated the energy of Jew-haters in early 20th century Germany; furious at the outcome of the First World War and a shattered economy.

Trump and the Republicans are using internment camps in the Southwest deserts to separate children from families, to warehouse illegal immigrants, and to reinforce their claims with American voters against the lawless and dangerous "other". They meanwhile use the idea of "originalism" to endorse and fortify authoritarianism under the banner of the US Constitution. They have adopted, virtually intact, the most extreme views of the AltR message machinery. If Hitler's speech writers and advisors were alive, they would praise in Fox News message manipulation and the stirring of nativist hatreds.

In Miami, last week, the leader of the Republican Party appeared at a protest staged by a right wing mob against Democrats and the appearance of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. The event recalled the shut-down of the Miami-Dade recount in the 2000 presidential Bush v. Gore, an outcome determined by the US Supreme Court, and staged by Republican operatives who parachuted into Miami from Washington, DC.

In November, American voters have a chance to put a check and to return balance to a deformed system of government led by a president unafraid of stirring the same nativist extremism that buoyed a fascist dictator in Germany. At the time, the good people of Germany said it was preposterous to believe that a demagogue could usurp the age of reason and impose a mass psychosis leading to the unimaginable persecution and murder of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and Christian dissenters.

"Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it."

Auschwitz-Birkenau