Cheap Seats 2020

Never Again Again - 01/08

By Rich Trzupek
  Asked to explain the rise in Anti-Semitic assaults in his city New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio gave the stock leftist answer: It’s Trump’s fault.
  The thinking, such as it is, goes like this: The Donald says mean things and that signals everyone that it’s OK to be mean as well. Yes it’s insulting, because it presupposes that people are both incredibly stupid and incredibly easy to manipulate. It’s also a mindset that blithely ignores all of the hateful things said and written by so-called progressives. Having been the target of many a hate-mail from the left, I can personally attest to their ability to spew vitriol.
  But no, I don’t believe that people attack synagogues and Jews walking down the street because President Trump has somehow whipped them into a frenzy by using strong words to take on the new Socialists and their media allies.
  Looking back at the rise of Nazism in Europe author Walker Percy traced its roots to the government that proceeded the Third Reich: The Weimar Republic. Established after the end of World War I, the Weimar Republic lasted from 1919 through 1933. It was an experiment designed by German intellectuals and like so many social experiments was doomed to failure.
  Anti-Semitism bloomed under Hitler, but it festered during the Weimar years. It was a natural outgrowth of the doctrine of Utilitarianism, which holds that all persons are not of equal value, but are rather to be valued based on the contributions they can or cannot make to society.
  Babies, the elderly and the handicapped are of far less value to society in the Utilitarian’s eyes. This creates an incentive to dispose of them, through abortion in the first case and euthanasia in the latter two. Though not fully-decriminalized the penalties for abortion were drastically reduced in Weimar Germany and German physicians talked openly about the virtues of dispatching “undesirables.”
  When one assigns different values to different lives, all life is devalued. This is the process that began in Weimar, leading directly to the Holocaust. Indeed, an estimated 275,000 “undesirable “ Germans who were neither Jewish nor Gypsies were put to death by the Nazis before the first death camps opened.
  We find ourselves living in a culture of death once more, especially in our big cities where progressive policies have taken a terrible toll. The lives of the poor and the lives of infants haver very little value to the left and their passing is pretty much ignored by progressives and the media.
  It is this atmosphere, Percy said, that inevitably leads to a rise in anti-Semitism. The Jewish people are the equivalent of a canary in a coal mine: Once they are under attack we know that foundations of a civilized society are crumbling.
  FBI statistics show a steady rise in hate crimes aimed at Jews over the last decade, far outpacing hate crimes that target Muslims or that target people based on their sexual identity.
  People like DeBlasio can’t see it, or refuse to see it, not that the source of their blindness matters. Their blindness amounts to acquiescence. The trend will continue to rise and I fear at an alarming rate. The Jewish people have been the world’s scapegoats for centuries. We can only hope that we will not have to say “never again” again.
  Email: richtrzupek@gmail.com

.

.

.