Kristallnacht: The Night of Broken Glass echoes into the 21st century.
November 9th marks 82 years since the Nazi-coordinated pogrom Kristallnacht. The SA-Paramilitary and civilians initiated a campaign of anti-semetic hatred against the Jewish population. Jewish homes, schools, businesses and places of worship were ransacked and pillaged with attackers demolishing buildings with sledgehammers. An estimated 91 Jewish people were killed, 267 synagogues destroyed and 30,000 Jewish people arrested and marched to concentration camps. The “Night of Broken Glass” is named after the shards of glass that littered the streets following the destruction and looting of businesses. The German authorities stood by and watched, choosing not to intervene.
Kristallnacht was a prelude to the final solution and serves to be a chilling reminder that the Holocaust did not just happen, but rather unfolded before the active bystanders of the world who turned a blind eye to and appeased an exponential growth in anti-semitism.
Anti-Semitism is the marginalisation and oppression of Jewish people based on a belief in harmful stereotypes and myths. It manifests itself in a plethora of ways, including stereotypes and biased attitudes about Jews, scapegoating, name-calling, online expressions of bias and hatred, swastikas and hate symbols scrawled in public places, anti-sematic rhetoric, vandalism in synagogues, hates crimes like the shooting in the Tree of Life synagogue, and more. — Anti-Defamation League.
Since the Second World War, the expression of overt anti-sematic views was somewhat limited to the fringes of political and social discourse. However, and a rise in hate crime and violence towards the Jewish community has made Jewish people across Europe wary and nervous. A toxic cocktail of unchecked disinformation on social media and social, political and economic uncertainty has fanned the flames of hate and violence.
Anti-Semitism is not just about attacking and demeaning the Jewish community. It is a symptom of a more significant societal issue, people who hold ideologies of hatred toward the Jewish people are likely to spew hatred about other marginalized groups. — Anti Defamation League.
2017, the year President Trump was inaugurated, marked the latest visible upsurge in anti-sematic hatred. Germany, the UK, Canada, the United States and France all recorded a troubling climb in violent episodes of anti-semitism over the course of that year. France recorded a 74% upsurge that year, as National Front candidate Marine Le Penn also won 34% of the popular vote in that year’s presidential election run-off vote. Le Penn sparked outrage days before that election commenting by dismissing the role French police played in rounding up 13,000 Jewish people for the Nazis in 1942. France’s President Macron has denounced this rise in hatred as a “repudiation of the republic and its values” yet the resurgence of the far-right across Europe, the politics of hatred and division and the courting of political extremists is a worrisome combination.
President Trump too has been denounced by Jewish organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League for stoking the flames of anti-semitism. Following the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 that led to the brutal murder of a counter-protestor, Trump stated that there were “good people on both sides” despite the chilling chants of “Jews will not replace us”.
The poison of anti-semitism is limited not just to the right-wing of European politics. In the UK, former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was recently suspended from the Labour Party, accused of dismissing and diminishing the problem that Labour Party had with anti-semistism following the publication of a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission which concluded that the party had broken equality laws. There is much debate in the UK as to how much Corbyn’s leadership impacted anti-semitism in the Labour Party, but there is no denying that the poison exists in the party and the consequences that it has had.
The rise of unchecked disinformation on social media has also contributed to a rise in anti-semistism, and has served to provide a platform to conspiracy theorists and hate-fuelled figures who would otherwise exist on the fringes of discourse. Following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, claims emerged from the American far right that powerful Jewish actors (supposedly led by billionaire George Soros) were inciting and guiding Black Lives Matter protests for their own perverse purposes. This latest manifestation of anti-semitism stems from a white supremacist trope that emerged in the Civil Rights Movements of the 1950s and 1960s.
The legacy of Kristallnacht ripples through both recent history and the world we live in today. The genocides of the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur hauntingly remind us that there is nothing to limit the capacity for and consequences of hatred but our moral duty as individuals and communities to tackle and check discrimination.
