Grandpa Sol Helped Liberate A Concentration Camp
My grandfather, Dr. Sol Nichtern, helped liberate the German concentration camp at Dachau. He was an impossibly young medic at age 25, and was part of the treatment forces that entered the camp right after its initial liberation. I know from my father that the events of that time deeply affected Grandpa Sol, simultaneously traumatizing him and renewing his sense of moral purpose. Many years later, he was interviewed about his time in the war. He marveled, above all else, at the physical location of the camp and the willful ignorance of the German citizenship to what was happening right next to their life-as-usual existence.
Grandpa Sol said: “The concentration Camp at Dachau is built right up against the side of the village; the houses go right up to the outer wall…And the German people who lived on the other side of the street claim that they didn’t know what was going on in the [very] next street.”
I am currently finishing reading Isabel Wilkerson’s amazing new book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents. In it, Wilkerson masterfully connects the rigid hierarchies of America’s racist social structures with the Indian caste system. She also considers the German Aryan movement which borrowed from Indian hierarchical thought and symbolism (ironically, Arya is a sanskrit word which means “noble one” and is often used in Buddhist teachings to describe great compassionate Bodhisattvas). A few of the details of what Wilkerson writes as she treats the Nazi rise to power should chill us to the bone. First, Hitler never won more than 38% of the vote in a German election. Second, when Nazi researchers searched the globe in the mid 1930s looking for legal structures which allowed for the coded framework of dehumanization which they would employ, their primary case study was…you guessed it, The United States. In fact, in terms of the racial purity standards used to distinguish those of the higher caste from the marginalized, several of the Nazi researchers commented that American race laws were too harsh for their own purposes!
I believe Caste should be required reading for Buddhist practitioners, not because Wilkerson discusses the Buddha, but because her thesis and storytelling help us recognize that meditative insight was not the Buddha’s only crucial offering. Within the rigid hierarchies of his time and the spiritual narrative which reinforced them, his attempt to create a casteless (and mindful) society in his monastic community was maybe his most important contribution.
But back to now…
This is our 1930s, friends. I am aware of Godwin’s Law, which warns against analogizing anything to Hitler. And you can’t exactly say right now in the US is like Germany in the 1930s. Not because it isn’t true, but rather because for many people on US soil, it’s already been true—with different degrees of immediacy and severity based on nothing more than melanin and genitalia—since 1619. However, in terms of the imminent possibility of losing free and fair elections to a despot, this is very much like Germany in the 1930s. I can’t think of what Grandpa Sol said about the proximity of death at Dachau to the blindness of daily life for the privileged without thinking of children in cages in my own country, or police with knees on the necks of those they are sworn to protect, all while I meditate or watched Netflix to try to “get away” from the political troubles of this modern world. Grandpa’s story as part of my lineage makes this moment–and its immediate danger—all the more real for me.
Study the entire history of human society. The people who nonviolently "overreacted" to fascist threats never look bad. At worst, we just come across as a little neurotic. I'm more than happy to be remembered as a slightly neurotic Buddhist when it comes to the need to defeat fascism and white supremacy right now.
Sure, we don’t control everything that happens on November 3. We have a mainstream media wedded to a reality tv model of generating advertising revenue, which gives them a clear and unyielding incentive to keep this race dramatic and close. These are exactly the conditions by which Trump could “win” the electoral college, even though he is almost certain to lose the popular vote by an even larger margin than the 3 million he lost by in 2016. We don’t control what the US Military decides to do, although hopefully they don’t support the madness of this modern GOP.
But we do control our own engagement. So I’m asking mindfulness practitioners to please engage with everything you have over the next 2 ½ months. If you want to get involved in Dharma Vote, please do. If there’s another way for you to engage, please do. Right now, turnout is literally everything.
And as you engage, please keep your optimism. This is not just the moment we could lose everything, this could genuinely be a turning point in the right direction. If you think of the US as a country about to fail and fall into an abyss, you might get very gloomy. But if you think of the US as a nation that already failed in 2016 when it allowed a racist and sexist reality tv star to govern against the will of the majority, a country that is now ready for its rebirth, then possibilities open up. The latter view is not only more optimistic, it’s more accurate. We’ve truly been a failed state since 2016.
On the other side of this moment, if free and fair elections do survive, something much more positive, progressive, and caste-free could blossom, as a new wave of leaders build movements from the ground up. But we need to buy time for that to happen organically. Either way, I want to wake up on November 4th knowing I did everything I could for the future. Don’t you?