Nine months ago, commenting on the then-upcoming book, “Last Stop Auschwitz: The Story of My Survival” by Eddy de Wind, a reader brought up the fact that Jews were not the only ones who were incarcerated in the Nazi death camps.
I mentioned that in their hate of everyone they deemed inferior, racially alien, different or enemies of the Third Reich, the Nazis herded hundreds of thousands of others into their camps, including Poles, Sinti, Roma (“Zigeuners” ), political dissenters, socialists, communists, homosexuals, convicts, military deserters and sentenced them to hard labor or extermination.
I continued that the Nazis used an elaborate system of “badges,” primarily colored triangles, sewn on their clothing to identify the prisoners and to “track” them, and gave several examples.
One of the examples was a “red triangle” used by the Nazis to designate “political prisoners: social democrats, socialists, communists and anarchists, “rescuers of Jews,” trade unionists, Freemasons.”
Never in my worst nightmares did I ever imagine that the day would come in the United States of America when the reelection campaign of a sitting American president would use such a symbol in political campaign ads.
But, in Trump’s America, the nightmare, the unthinkable has happened.
Dozens of ads appeared on Facebook placed by Trump’s reelection campaign that included the hateful symbol, apparently “as part of the campaign’s online salvo against antifa and ‘far-left groups.’”
Facebook has now removed the posts and the ugly symbols for “violating our policy against organized hate…”
However, the pain to Holocaust survivors had already been inflicted; the attack on our sense of values and decency had already occurred.
Before their removal, however, the advertisements gained more than a million impressions across the Facebook pages of Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. They began running on Facebook on Wednesday and were flagged by a journalist for Fortune magazine on Thursday.
Not even the immortal words of lawyer Joseph Welch directed at Republican senator Joseph R. McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency?” seem adequate here.
And what happened to “Never Again?”
