The Buck stops at the Top: State-condoned American Terror

"Those who can make you believe aburdities, can make you commit atrocities." 

Voltaire

Above and below photos: Auschwitz, from German archives.
Jewish victims, young and old, mothers, grandmothers, their children, were sent to the gas chambers by the Nazis
 in horrendous acts of  STATE-SPONSORED extermination of European Jews. Over six million Jews were killed. More than 17 million people, adding in Roma, Poles, Gays, POWs, were killed overall in the German genocide of WWII.  Add to this the over 14 million killed in the horror story of  state-sponsored murder in eastern Europe, the "Bloodlands," the countries caught between Hilter and Stalin with no exit, no way out. 

"We need to remember our history, or we are doomed to repeat it."
 

Rose Mallinger, 97, was one of eleven innocent victims murdered at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburg by a crazed man with an assault rifle who had posted anti-Semitic rants on social media. He yelled that "all Jews should be killed."

He killed Rose. She had come to America from Lithuania as a child, fleeing anti-Semitism and oppression  She had lived to witness the Holocaust, the state-sanctioned murder of over 6 million Jews during World War II.  Hitler's "final solution."  She lived in Squirrel Hill in Pittsburg, Mr. Roger's Neighborhood.

Yes, the very neighborhood Fred Rogers made his home. The place from which he taught us and our children to love our neighbors, to be kind. The heart of Pittsburg's Jewish community. Rose Mallinger was killed in cold blood in a vicious act of anti-Semitism right here in America, the very same anti-semitism she had fled some 90 years before.

History repeating itself.

Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz,
family doctor to all. 

There were 10 other victims, all remembered as good people, generous, kind, caring: Daniel Stein, 71; Joyce Feinberg, 75; Richard Gottfried, 65;  Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, 66; brothers Cecil Rosenthal, 59, and David Rosenthal 54; husband and wife Bernice Simon, 84 and Sylvan Simon, 86; Melvin Wax, 88; and Irving Younger, 69. America's loss.The sadness is overwhelming.

I believe this is on tRump. This is on Republicans and the NRA, who refuse to even consider common sense gun control. It is on the alt-right and those who supported Kavanaugh for SCOTUS. It is on those who promote violence and do nothing to stop it. It's on elected representatives like Kevin McCarthy (R, CA) who called out certain Democratic fundraisers--George Soros, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg--who happened to be Jewish, in a rant that rivaled tRump's tweets and unhinged rhetoric.

Why? To what purpose? To get people to believe "absurdities" and  lead them to commit them as well? To encourage them to commit atrocities fostered by hate and an ignorance of history?

It starts at the top.

Julia Ioffe, journalist and MSNBC contributor, spoke mournfully about what tRump, his media supporters, and Congressional Republicans have done to create the conditions where such hate and violence occur and thrive, and to what tragic consequences. She made a point to call out the anti-immigrant vitriol as well. A president and his ilk carrying on darkly about Muslims, Mexicans, the refugees marching to America, the Middle Easterners among them. Talking about a "caravan" of invaders and sending the military to the border. 

Scare tactics to create fear, to divide us, to turn us against each other.  A form of state-sponsored American terror. Terrorism from within.

Julia Ioffe knows this playbook well. It turns out that her own family fled Russia in 1988 to escape the rising tide of virulent anti-semitism there. She spoke from experience. So did many of those who were at the Tree of Life Synagogue a few weeks ago.

"The people at the top set the tone of what's acceptable and what isn't.....It's not just social media and facebook....The buck stops with the president,"  Ioffe wrote.  Trump's ignorant, uninformed, hateful Nationalism ("I am a Nationalist," he boasted) has put America and the world in danger.  We've seen it before. We're seeing it again.

Some sources:
*  https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/28/us/pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting-victims/index.html
*  https://www.yahoo.com/news/nearly-century-rose-mallinger-saw-best-worst-america-saturday-193121954.html
*  Wikipedia, the Holocaust, a good general description. There are many excellent histories, all available online.

Here' a map showing gun violence in 2018. It's an incredible graphic of an horrific American reality. My friend Kristina, herself an immigrant from Russia, calls it "a map of lost hopes and dreams."  According to data compiled by Gun Violence Archive, an independent data-collection and research group: "In 2018 alone, including the most recent carnage at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, there have been 47,220 gun-related incidents resulting in 11,984 deaths in the United States. "  I think that this in itself is a form of state-sponsored and condoned violence.