The Holocaust and 9/11

(Deliberately positioned below the post above.)

Jews have endured centuries of pogroms, expulsions, segregation, mass murders, and the Holocaust. We haven't surrendered to fascism. We all grow up knowing that people will happily kill us and we haven't given up our beliefs in intellectual debate or argument, to the point that there is an old saying that if you need five opinions on something, ask three Jews. One crackpot regime killed maybe 30-40% of us and we are still here.

When I think of the Holocaust and the murderous times before then and some of the times afterwards, I cannot help but regard the paroxysms of fear and paranoia that gripped this country after 9/11 as being rather pathetic. "Oh my, people don't like us, they want to kill us for being Americans. Oh, the humanity!"

Oh, boo fucking hoo.

The response of the Republicans and the spineless Democrats was to go as close to throwing our democracy and our civil rights and our freedoms and the entire fucking Constitution into the shredder as we have since the McCarthy era. The Lincoln Administration, which did suspend habeus corpus, held free and fair elections in the middle of the Civil War, something the Bush Administration would have scrapped if they could have figured out how to do it (as Rudy Giuliani tried to do in New York by postponing the mayoral election for three months). Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, had far more faith in the democratic process than did other Republicans such as Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Richard Cheney and George W. Bush. When 9/11 hit, the second thing the Bush Administration did was to do whatever they could to subvert freedom, liberty and the rule of law (the first thing they did was to plan to invade Iraq). Paranoia reigned and still does, to some extent.

Give me a fucking break. Grow up and grow a pair, America. We took a sucker punch. Compared to what has been inflicted on the Jews and yes, compared to the tribulations inflicted on the African-Americans and the Native Americans, 9/11 was a fucking paper cut. Our country still survives, damaged as it may be by the actions of the Bush Administration.

We took a punch.

We are still here.

Walk it off.