Showing posts with label Holocaust. Show all posts

November 10, 2025

The futility of desperately seeking hope. The signs at the entrances to the Nazi death camps read "Work Shall Set You Free."

It drives me crazy. It leads me to actually shout out loud at home.

People are desperate for hope. They want to hear answers to the question “what can we actually do to stop Trump?”

They want to feel that going out to hold signs along a busy road once week like they do around the country will make a difference.

This is human nature. Feeling helpless when your life as you know it, your lifestyle, is not just jeopardized, but may be forcibly taken from you is a normal reaction. When this is the fact, pretending it isn’t inevitable when it is for certain happening or about to happen is clinical denial or delusional.

Although some people have been herded onto deportation airplanes, we haven’t been herded by armed soldiers into cattle cars to a place that has a sign over the gate that says “work shall make you free.”

Perhaps some of the Jews headed to the gas chambers saw that sign and had a glimmer of hope, a fleeting moment that defied logic. Even if though they didn’t know that some wouldn’t last more than a week before they were killed, while others were going to be worked to death, they had to know that the SS and Gestapo who brought the there weren’t going to provide work that would make them free.

I am under no illusion that my using AI to make images of Nap-oleon Trump like these > 1 does anything more than provide me amusement. I’d hoped it would amuse my readers. It doesn’t solve anything. It is just an escape, a momentary respite.

All the SNL skits, the riffs mocking Trump by late night comics, the editorial cartoons (like those by Ann Telnais), and even the No Kings protests, play into Trump’s hands. He may personally bristle when someone or something scores a hit that bruises his ego, but he also is firm in his belief that those people opposing him are, as the line used in several movies says, bringing knives to a gunfight.

I know that keeping one’s sanity and not succumbing to clinical depression or being debiliated by anxiety is crucial. It is vital for all of us to find ways to take care of our mental health. If it means just avoiding even thinking about the news, this is what you have to do.

I would rather see people seek balance. Escape for a period of time and then refocus your attention so you see what is going on.

You might say to me that is seems like I am saying I should give up hope. I am loath to state that I this is what I am saying. Don’t kid yourself. Trump holds not only the reins of power, but is whipping us with them. He may not be drawing blood yet, at least for those who haven’t been targeted by his ICE thugs, but I see it as only a matter of time before we are all feeling the sting on our metaphorical flesh.

My suggestion as someone who was a therapist for 40 years and still thinks like a shrink is that we should do what help us to feel good but not kid ourselves. If you want to head out to the road with a group of like minded people and hold signs because this makes you feel like at least youre doing something, and it feels good to be with friends and have people who drive by hink and wave, go ahead and do it enthusiastically.

Everyone must practice self-care. I broke my practice of having the news on TV in the morning and going to Music Choice and listening to oldies.

I just want people to understand that things have gone so far beyond being bad that bad can’t even be seen in the rear view mirror.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have posted my Trump as Nap-oleon of yesterday’s Substack which I took down.

July 31, 2025

Trump is the death president. Where are the human interest stories about people whose lives were distrupted or destroyed by Trump? By Hal M. Brown

We see videos of people being brutalized and treated as less than human by Trump’s immigrant hunting Gestapo. See, for example, “'Hard or easy?' ICE agents seen using terrifying new tactic to detain immigrants.”

With notable exceptions like the few lucky people who came back after being brutalized in the Salvadoran prison of horrors, we don’t learn about how their lives are destroyed after they are disappeared.

These are the dramatic tales, but we also have untold stories about another group of people who weren’t literally grabbed up by masked Gestapo.

(The actual Nazi Gestapo didn’t need to hide their identities. Nobody would dare go after them at home. Wait for this being a crime punished by summary execution here.)

Far less dramatic are the stories of how the lives of federal employees fired by the DOGE Boys and overall downsizing of federal agencies have been disrupted.

The media looks at how the work of agencies is effected, a how in a few cases the government scrambled to rehired fired staff.

Depending on where you look the numbers of people who lost their jobs because of DOGE start at a low of 130,000 and go up from there. This is a Google search for aritlces about this.

This is the AI created overview:

While the exact number is difficult to pinpoint due to limited public disclosure, it's estimated that around 135,000 federal workers have been fired or resigned as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) workforce reductions. This figure includes both outright firings and voluntary departures, such as buyouts, that were prompted by the initiative.Additionally, there are plans for further reductions, potentially reaching a total of 285,000 lost jobs, according to some sources

Here’s a Reuters article:

Trump’s handling of Covid caused impossible to precisely determine loss of life and considerable suffering. “Approximately 450,000 Americans died from COVID-19 during the final year of Donald Trump's presidency, with studies suggesting that about 40% of these deaths could have been avoided if the U.S. had matched the death rates of other wealthy nations. His administration's response has been widely criticized for being inadequate and harmful to public health.” (AI generated)

Here’s a Scientific American article about this:

If 285,000 people died as a direct and incontrovertible of something a president did it would headline news. It would have to be something akin to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which caused 150,000 to 246,000 deaths. However, consider the following:

More than 14 million additional deaths are projected to occur globally by 2030 due to cuts to USAID, including over 4.5 million children under the age of five. These estimates are based on the significant reduction in health and humanitarian programs previously supported by the agency. (AI generated)

People tend to respond emotionally to human interest stories, to accounts of how a person who they would relate to was effected by trauma. These stories take numbers, in the most famous example the 6+ million people who died by disease, starvation, or murder in the Holocaust death camps, and focus on just one individual. Anne Frank is a good example. Anne Frank died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Right now in the land of the free and the home of the brave we have people hiding out for fear of Trump’s Gestapo. There may even be a 15 year old immigrant girl being hidden in someone’s attic.

I am not naive enough to think that one compelling story, one diary that could be published and made into numerous movies, could pull at the collective heartstrings of MAGA. That is the height of wishful thinking. Trump and his MAGA minions have no heart.

………

Addendum:

I posted a link to yesterday’s Substack about South Park’s show about Trump on Facebook and it was removed for the reason shown below.

I’m not going to appeal this. I hope readers don’t count on Facebook to find my Substacks. I far prefer that those who like what I write Subscribe.

……

This post is public so feel free to share it.

July 10, 2023

There's an ethical lesson to be learned from the collapse of the Dutch government over immigration policy

By Hal Brown

This blog story is avalialable on a single page here, along with the Disquis comment secton at bottom of page.

Here's a basic summary of what inspried todays blog from CNN:

Below are three points which address what I consder to be basic ethical concerns. They are from this New York Times (subscription) article from July 7th.

“One of the values that are important with the proposals is that children grow up with their parents,” a statement by the Christian Union party said. “As a family party, that is what we stand for.” The party said it wanted to work with “heart and soul for a humane and effective migration policy.”
The large numbers of arrivals have strained the Netherlands’ housing capacity, which was already suffering a shortage for the country’s more than 17 million people.
“Everybody wants to find a good, effective solution that also does justice to the fact that this is about human lives,” the finance minister, Sigrid Kaag, a member of the D66 party, said before the talks began.

The belief that there is a moral imperative for being willing to sacrifice your own comfort, up to your own life in extraordinary circumstances, is a core tenet of all or most of the world's religions and a basis for the philosophy of ethics.

As Wiki explains, "ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality by defining concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime."

Whether in the Netherlands or the United States the immigration of people fleeing persecution, sometimes risking their lives to do so, has been a major divisive poltical issue.

At the most simple level this boils down to actually giving up something tangible, for example in the Netherlands better housing capacity or something intangible like in the United States and other countries the sharing of your country with people of other ethnic and relgious backgrounds and life styles.

From immigration to human rights for everyone including groups not only demonized by Trump and more blatantly (if we ever thought this was possible by a right-winger) by DeSantis, but also like Marine Le Pen in France, it's all about ethics. More specifically it is about a lack of ethics.

When I was considering writing this I shared some of my ideas with a dear friend whose parents survived a NAZI concentration camp. She reminded me of this line from "The Diary of Anne Frank":

“I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”

She wrote this about a month before she and her family were arrested.

Anne Frank was in her early to mid-teens when in hiding and we can speculate that despite the abject fear she lived with knowing what she and her family's fate could be, she depserately tried to maintain her optimistic view that deep down all people were good at heart.

To contemplate that this is not demonstrated in real life and that while there are people who try to live their lives adhering as best as they can to an ethical code, there are those who, to put it bluntly, are just plain evil

By conincidence in relationship to my writing this blog about Dutch politics, this was written when she and he family were in hiding in Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

During World War II the NAZI's occupied the Netherlands and about 75% of the Jews living their were sent to concentration camps where most of them were killed.

Between 25,000 and 34,000 Jews fled from Germany in the 1930's. For more see The Holocaust in The Netherlands from Wikipedia.

Dutch citizens had engaged in a valient and fierce resistance againt the NAZI's which you can read about here.

Also by chance, as I did some research about the Netherlands and the Holocaust I came across tis article:

The article begins with a reference to Anne Frank:

The story of teenage diarist Anne Frank is known across the world. But a new survey suggests a “disturbing” lack of awareness about the Holocaust in the Netherlands, where she and her family hid for years before being discovered and deported to a Nazi concentration camp.

and goes on as follows:

A Dutch Holocaust survivor and Jewish cultural leaders have expressed dismay at the survey, which was released Wednesday and suggests that more than half of the residents were not aware of the deportation and murder of Jews from the country during World War II.
The survey, conducted and released by the New York-based nonprofit Claims Conference ahead of International Holocaust Memorial Day on Friday, found that 53% of the respondents couldn’t identify the Netherlands as a country where the events of the Holocaust happened — rising to 60% among millennial and Gen Z respondents, meaning those under 40.
Historians estimate more than 70% of the Netherlands’ prewar Jewish population was killed during the Holocaust, more than 100,000 in total. Frank hid in a secret room in Amsterdam with her family from 1942 to 1944 before she died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp weeks before its liberation.

I can do no better than to end this blog with a quote from Mark Lezer who was six when the NAZI's invaded the Netherlands and who lost family in the Holocaust. He said it is imperative that the story of the Holocaust should never be allowed to fade from memory.

“Because if you don’t know enough about the Holocaust and you do not know that so many people died because of the Nazi persecution, then you do not know enough to be realistic about the future.”

This should go not only for the Dutch, but for everyone whose country is facing a push by authoriatians who envision ruling over a country not too different than what Hitler wanted for Germany.

Hal Brown's Substack (fomerly Hal Brown's Blog)