No monopoly on ‘Inspirational’

Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day.

I spent the day reflecting on chapter eight of ‘Caste: The Origins of our Discontent’, a chapter titled ‘The Nazis and the Acceleration of Caste’.

See, I think an important aspect of any day of remembrance, including Holocaust Remembrance Day, is to recall the steps that humanity took towards such abhorrence.

It didn’t happen overnight.

There was no one singular moment where Nazi Germany decided to ‘become evil’ or suddenly started to act out on their hate.

It was gradual.

It almost always is.

In chapter eight of Caste, Wilkerson explains how, on 5 June 1934, a committee of Nazi bureaucrats gathered to debate the legal framework for an Aryan nation during a closed-door (but transcribed) session in the Reich capital. They were working out what would become the Nuremberg Laws.

Do you know what was first on the agenda that day?

Learning from the United States of America.

Learning how the USA had “managed its marginalized groups and guarded its ruling white citizenry,” as Wilkerson puts it.

Or, as was put by the German press agency Grossdeutscher Pressedienst, “For us Germans, it is especially important to know and to see how one of the biggest states in the world with Nordic stock already has race legislation which is quite comparable to that of the German Reich.”

Yes, it is true, Hitler was a fan of America.

It is recorded history.

His self-proclaimed “bible” was written by Madison Grant, a leading eugenicist from New York. It was titled ‘The Passing of the Great Race’, in which he wrote of sterilising and quarantining “inferior stocks.”

Hitler wrote him a letter of gratitude, noting, “The book is my bible.”

Those seventeen men on 5 June 1934 also considered the South African and Australian models of racial segregation in their search for a prototype, but it was the United States of America that they considered to be a “classic example.” They were amazed and inspired at how extensive and effective racial legislation was in the USA. Some of the Nazi scholars and researchers who prepared materials for that day even thought that the American laws took things too far, or that they were, surely, just paper-based and not enacted through the courts.

Just over a year later though, in September of 1935, when Hitler announced the laws that later expanded into The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, after which Nazi Germany enacted a range of ever-tightening restrictions – when the coming horror of the holocaust began to form with further clarity – when “Germany became a fully-fledged racist regime.” We know from history that when all of this occurred, it was the American laws that were the main foreign president for the legislative instruments empowering this hate.

You see, all that is good does not have a monopoly on the word ‘inspirational’.

• Hate can be inspirational.

• Horror can be inspirational.

• Oppression can be inspirational.

As soon as human beings are seen as less than, as sub-human, as animal, as not like us - as soon as one group of humans feels/thinks/legislates the right to oppress another group of humans - these are the conditions for such inspiration to thrive.

These are the conditions we need to fight against, to rally against, to ensure never happens again.

Everywhere, for everyone.

My takeaway here is simply just to tell you to pick up a copy of Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent and join me in reading it.

Anything I’ve quoted here is from chapter eight of the book.

I am just a fifth of the way through, and it’s honestly changing my life.