The Holocaust, refugees, and haunting echoes
For decades we’ve told ourselves that we are a “nation of immigrants,” and we look back on the Thirties and the Forties as the Greatest Generation. And, of course, we are, and they were. But that’s not the whole story, is it?
As the Holocaust swept across Europe, Americans knew. And, yet, we kept the door shut, even as desperate refugees sought asylum here. Burns documents “the tragic human consequences of public indifference, bureaucratic red tape and restrictive quota laws in America.”
“It is a fantastic commentary on the inhumanity of our times that for thousands and thousands of people a piece of paper with a stamp on it is the difference between life and death,” Dorothy Thompson wrote in 1938.
But, really, it was so much worse than that.
We knew, and we turned them away anyway. It was an act of inhumanity that should be almost incomprehensible but, instead, it seems too familiar. Americans justified their indifference — and rationalized sending back Jews to certain death — using arguments that we will all recognize.
The Great Replacement Theory has a long dark history….
https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/reliving-a-sordid-chapter-in-american