Setting the tone
Julia Ioffe asks how much responsibility Trump has for the synagogue massacre.
The summary: he doesn’t have to do the shooting himself to be part of the cause of the shooting.
Culpability is a tricky thing, and politicians, especially of the demagogic variety, know this very well. Unless they go as far as organized, documented, state-implemented slaughter, they don’t give specific directions. They don’t have to. They simply set the tone. In the end, someone else does the dirty work, and they never have to lift a finger — let alone stain it with blood. I saw it while reporting on Russia, where, after unexpected pro-democracy protests and the annexation of Crimea, Putin created an environment so vicious, so toxic (he called his critics “national traitors” and “a fifth column”) that, when assassins killed opposition leader Boris Nemtsov at the foot of the Kremlin walls in 2015, it was easy for people to blame the divisive political rhetoric as if it were a spontaneous weather pattern, rather than Putin himself for creating it. And everyone understood immediately the message it sent: Dissent is a deadly business. Putin may not have ordered Nemtsov’s assassination, but Russia’s elite could clearly see he wasn’t too upset about the outcome.
Trump yesterday? Joking about his bad hair day a couple of hours after the slaughter.
When President Trump blamed “both sides” for Charlottesville, his supporters heard him loud and clear: “I knew Trump was eventually going to be like, meh, whatever,” Anglin said. “Trump only disavowed us at the point of a Jewish weapon. So I’m not disavowing him.” Many others in the alt-right praised Trump’s statement as moral equivocation on Charlottesville. To them, this, rather than the forced, obligatory condemnation, was the important signal. (According to the Anti-Defamation League, the incidence of anti-Semitic hate crimes jumped nearly 60 percent in 2017, the biggest increase since it started keeping track in 1979. What made 2017 so different? It was Trump’s first year in office.)
When Trump called himself a nationalist in Houston last week, the alt-right knew exactly what he meant. One alt-right commenter was elated because nationalism “is inherently connected to race.” Another wrote that he was “literally shaking” with glee. Still another wrote “THE FIRE RISES.”
The president did not tell a deranged man to send pipe bombs to the people he regularly lambastes on Twitter and lampoons in his rallies, so he’s not at fault. Trump didn’t cause another deranged man to tweet that the caravan of refugees moving toward America’s southern border (the one Trump has complained about endlessly) is paid for by the Jews before he shot up a synagogue. Trump certainly never told him, “Go kill some Jews on a rainy Shabbat morning.”
But this definition of culpability is too narrow, too legalistic — and ultimately too dishonest. The pipe-bomb makers and synagogue shooters and racists who mowed a woman down in Charlottesville were never even looking for Trump’s explicit blessing, because they knew the president had allowed bigots like them to go about their business, secure in the knowledge that, like Nemtsov’s killers, they don’t really bother the president, at least not too much. His role is just to set the tone. Their role is to do the rest.
There’s no such thing as “just locker-room talk.”
It’s unreal. It’s not as if he’s giving them anything, is it? The only reason that these people are prepared to do anything for that man is that he has given them permission to do whatever they like to the people they’ve been raised to hate. I’m not so sure that the Hitler comparisons are necessarily enough; I’m thinking the circuses of ancient Rome.
Current and not so current situations in both Russia and the former USA involving killings that are at least soft-peddled or occasionally all but openly sanctioned by leaders who do not, however, directly order these assassinations themselves recall the Holocaust-related controversy that Holocaust deniers seize upon: the fact that no document has yet been found in which Hitler explicitly orders the mass murder of Jews.
But historian Ian Kershaw’s multiple books show how such a document was not necessary to launch the Holocaust. The people in personal contact with Hitler, along with others who were close to these subordinates, didn’t need explicit words on a Fuhrer-signed piece of paper. They knew what Hitler want without being told in this way.
So they began, in a saying that Kershaw makes the title of a chapter in one of his Hitler biographies, “working toward the Fuhrer” — building the death camps, instituting their hideous regimes of torture, and inventing new forms of killing chemicals that could destroy large numbers of people with much greater efficiency and speed than mass shootings could. They knew that Hitler would not object to what they were doing.
In the lands of Putin and the Trump Creature, this syndrome, if to a different degree thus far, remains an active form of cover — or “plausible deniability,” as Watergate-speak had it — for would-be tyrants.
Quite. The Wannsee conference, I believe, was mostly a matter of live talk, with minimal note-taking. They were careful not to write down “The Fuhrer said kill all the Jews.”
Oh look, a translation of the minutes.
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/Wannsee/wanseeminutes.html
They don’t spell it out. It’s clear what they mean but then we have hindsight. It’s all about expulsion, plus forced labor. Hint hint nudge nudge.
They get dangerously explicit in one place though:
“The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly” – that must have stood out at the Nuremberg trials.