One of the things that comes of doing a deep dive into Holocaust research—by which I don't mean simply reading a small list of books like The Diary of Anne Frank, Night and The Book Thief, but scouring the scholarly literature, personal archives and emotionally grueling site visits—is that you get real about not only the human capacity for evil, but your own capacity for evil. This is because you realize that the real actions of the Holocaust were carried out not by a barking mustachioed man pointing his finger at underlings and moving them like chess pieces, but by neighbors, some of whom believed in the tenets of National Socialism, but most of whom were motivated by fear of things like personal ostracism, loss of career advancement and, ultimately, of jail and worse.

Ostracism, we know, is a deeply torturous psychological weapon. It has the same effect as solitary confinement, or, to take a broad and current example, of endless lockdown. We all know it’s taken a lot to remain mentally healthy in the past year because of the twin dynamics of physical and social isolation. The term “social distancing” is, in itself, a sword that pierces the most instinctual part of our brains (and a term I refuse to use). We are social creatures, and as such, we are very easily persuaded by messaging that threatens the loss of social bonds.

Here is the now-infamous tweet that got actress Gina Carano summarily fired from her role on The Mandalorian:
“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…. even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”

A more accurate case might have made if she had used Hitler's persecution of communists as an example, as the political motive there was a parallel one. However, that history is lesser known and that's why I'm writing my next book about it. The Holocaust is our cultural reference point, and so that's the one she used. The point she made was not an anti-Semitic dog whistle as alleged, but a totally legit one. Very famous books* have been written about the exact dynamic she described.

In this unforgiving and flattening climate, a former MMA-fighter-turned-action-movie-star is held to the same linguistic rigor as authors and scholars for whom this subject is their life's work. That is unfair. Her words may be clumsy, but that’s where PR people come in. The appropriate action on the part of Lucasfilm would have been to help her clarify her intent. In a recent interview, she not only attempted to do just that (and a calm listen would have revealed that her point was, in fact, the same as these authors'), but revealed that there was, in fact, a PR representative who was sent to her but was never able to do the job, because Carano’s firing was so sudden that she herself only found out about it on social media.

The sick thing about the spin on this point, regarding neighborly complicity and the manipulation of language, is that not only is it a completely accepted premise in the field of Holocaust and other genocide research (the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC even has an exhibit called “Some Were Neighbors” https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/museum-exhibitions/some-were-neighbors), but one that I have personally been taking into schools and other institutions in my author visits for several years now. It resonates deeply with students in particular, because they are learning about their personal responsibilities in the world, especially the role of bullies and peer pressure in their choice-making.

The lessons of the Holocaust are myriad. Yes—and I make this point every time—the Jews were targeted qua Jews (which was, to the Nazis, a mashup of racial, religious, political and hegemonic identity), as the main target of the Nazis, and this truth must never be downplayed or equalized by other victims of the regime (communists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.). Hitler's genocide was against the Jews. But the Holocaust was not the first, and not the only, genocide.

The first modern genocide, from which Hitler took careful notes, was the Armenian Genocide around World War I, in which the Ottoman Turkish government under the Committee of Union and Progress party (aka “The Young Turks”) claimed the lives of up to 1.2 million Armenian Christians out of a population of 1.5 million. The term “genocide” was coined by a Polish Jewish Holocaust refugee named Raphael Lemkin in response to the Armenian Genocide and making sure it was applied to the Holocaust. Since then, an increasingly opening world has seen genocides in places as far afield as Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and now in China, with the forcible deportation, sterilization and execution of the country’s Uighur Muslim minority.

In every case, a culture of fear and moralization—whether that comes from the State or another faction—creates pressure on citizens to ostracize and denounce neighbors, or to ignore their persecution in broad daylight. One thing that makes the genocide of European Jewry especially unique is how well documented it is—both in German records and in international newspapers, by intact sites (like Auschwitz) and archaeological evidence (like the Babi Yar massacre site) and by survivors themselves, who, after an unfortunate period after the war in which they found no one wanted to hear about their plight, have generously given their testimonies in places like the Spielberg Archive so that we might learn from them. Thank God.

Was Gina Carano averring that Republicans, MAGA or conservatives generally constitute a group that is facing a genocide on par with the Jews, Armenians or Rwandans? No. But Holocaust research and the dissemination of its stories have done their job sufficient to cause an awareness even in an action movie actress that the roots of totalitarianism at any point of the spectrum lie in neighborly dynamics fomented by outside forces. And that is the point.

Anyone who pays attention—in a historical sense, and deliberately not in a partisan sense—to the history of authoritarianism, totalitarianism and worse knows that we are at least in the beginning stages of control from an authoritarian spirit. I say “spirit” because it is that. I mean that term literally—I do believe in spiritual forces of wickedness (Ephesians 6:12)—but also in the sense of “zeitgeist”—a collective “spirit of the age”, an atmosphere in which we simply exist.

Those under the sway of this spirit have taken whatever real and true peccadilloes existed in the last administration and—never to miss an opportunity for control, as these types do—have swung so far the other way in some imagined “mandate,” thinking they can fool people with manipulated language and euphemisms like “unity.” (Note: the communist party in Germany was called the “Socialist Unity Party.”) “Unity”, under collectivist regimes like the SED, certainly did not mean "consensus". It meant total conformity to the particular definitions of reality that the regime espoused. To think that the United States, for all its good intentions, is protected from human nature and the primal threat of ostracism by something as flimsy as the Constitution is a fantasy. One group—and these cannot be tidily defined by the terms “conservative”, “MAGA” or “far-right”—believes in the Constitution and its guarantees, but the other group—also not easily defined by labels—does not—and even if it says it does, this again is a convenient linguistic manipulation, because functionally, the reality is different. I know; I carry a pocket copy of the Constitution in my purse at all times and can count egregious violations of at least four amendments this past year alone.

As someone without a dog in the partisan fight, and as an artist who’s accepted her place “outside the gate”, I frankly don’t care whether it’s the Left or Right (which are not even scientifically consistent terms) doing the authoritarianizing. I care about human dynamics and how everyday, average people find themselves caught up in mass movements. People who get up in the morning and make their beds and drink their coffee, and as the day/week/month/year goes on, find themselves making excuses for engaging in truly heinous actions, probably the least of which is language control, but which often (not always, thankfully!) end in maßengräber—mass graves.

Talk of the Holocaust has to be handled very carefully by people who know what they’re talking about. I'll make the case ad infinitum that Holocaust comparisons are inaccurate and abused 90% of the time. But it’s not like Carano or anyone else are stupid. We can see, if we choose, what we are in the middle of, and how quickly we got here without any real threats except basic pressure.

As an anecdote, I can recall dozens of sermons and discussions saying that Christians aren’t really persecuted in the West. And no, neither we nor your average liberal (which is the best label I can think of for myself, though I mean different things by it perhaps) are currently faced with torture or execution. But I do know people who have been forced out of their jobs, slandered and libeled, reputations destroyed and even their kids taken away for the fact that they are of that faith, and the gross conclusions some draw as a result. The whole point of this thought exercise is that there is a beginning of birth pangs, and that if we are aware—thanks to the grueling witness of Holocaust survivors and the stories inspired by theirs—we get the benefit of having our eyes opened. We can pray, as I do daily, for frustration and exposure of nefarious actors, whether their motives are power or self-righteousness. We can refuse to engage in false secular religions on the one hand, or (speaking to those in my faith) Moralistic Therapeutic Deism*** on the other. We can remain watchful, and act to disarm oppression and false narratives where we see them. We can pay close attention to how we treat our neighbors, co-workers, family members and friends—both to their faces and in our thoughts and words about them.

And we can cultivate ourselves, ask ourselves questions about our deepest motivations and commitments, and how we might see those playing out for both good and evil.

As for me, I’m trying to cultivate a deep peace and joie de vivre, through family love and bonding, awareness of my needs and fears, and personal (not vocational) art making—color field landscapes and pottery, and a nice, low-pressure icon painting class I’m taking online. I’m planning the year’s garden and looking forward in particular to the intoxicating scents that come from my Carding Mill and Francis Meilland roses, the daily snow pea harvest, and the bubbling of my little fountain. We have chickens giving eggs, healthy kids who aren’t addicted to anything, and a 22-year marriage in which we still really like and challenge each other. What more could I ask for? I could be hauled off to the gulag tomorrow and live, like Viktor Frankl, on those memories.

Meanwhile, I have my “yes” and my “no” and my stubborn refusal to live by lies (https://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/SolhenitsynLies.php) or let nefarious actors define the terms for me. This is because I live, already, eternally, in the Kingdom that is not of this world and so has no end. So I am happy. And I hope, in that, to extend that happiness to my neighbors.

*I point specifically to books like “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” by Christopher R. Browning, and “Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland” by the inimitable Jan T. Gross, whose book “Fear” was one of my most treasured sources in researching the character of Lev Goldszmyt in What the Night Sings.

**”[The] United Nations approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide [on December 9, 1948]. This convention establishes "genocide” as an international crime, which signatory nations “undertake to prevent and punish.” It defines genocide as:
[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
a. Killing members of the group;
b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Source: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/what-is-genocide

***This term comes from a 2005 study on the beliefs of American teens https://youthandreligion.nd.edu/announcements/soul-searching-the-religious-and-spiritual-lives-of-american-teenagers/ but I tip the hat to Rod Dreher and his book “Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.” https://www.amazon.com/Live-Not-Lies-Christian-Dissidents/dp/0593087399