Joe Scarborough’s recent on-air and on-target rant about Republicans wrongly slapping a Nazi or socialist label on anyone or anything they disagree with struck a painful chord with me. My dad, rest his soul, was one of the liberators of the Dachau concentration camp. Born near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he grew up speaking Polish and was able to talk directly to the survivors at Dachau. His gruesome experience haunted our family in ways that people like Newt Gingrich cannot imagine.
As a child, I always had to play within my mom’s viewing range in the late afternoon, because the first thing my dad would say when he came home from work was “Where is SHE?” (He meant me.) And I learned early on that Dad would get worried if I lingered too long at the park. Being a kid, I didn’t give it much thought at the time. It was just Dad being Dad.
The context came in the late 1980s, when the Holocaust documentary Shoah was broadcast on television. Dad watched it very closely and finally began to open up about his own experiences. He had peered into a true Hell where humanity was lost, and I think one way for him to feel he had some control over his own environment was to be assured of my whereabouts.
In his later life, he would have major eruptions whenever he encountered a Holocaust denier. He wouldn’t say to them, “You have a right to your opinion” or “You can believe what you want” because, for him, belief in the Holocaust was non-negotiable.
If Dad were around today, I expect he’d be erupting over how politicians invoke Nazis as if they were evil cartoon characters. Anything that diminished the enormity of the Holocaust was anathema to him.
Last year, we had a Congressional candidate who claimed that the Nazis were responsible for the concept of the separation of church and state. That kind of stuff made my dad angry — an outrageous claim about the Nazis gets debunked quickly, and the unintended result is that somehow the Nazis look a little less bad (in this case, more tolerant of the role of religion in society). Repeat this thousands of times and people’s perceptions will change — that was perhaps my dad’s greatest fear.
To Mr. Scarborough — my dad is no longer around to thank you, but I do so on his behalf. He would have been ranting right along with you!
Joanne Butler is a senior economics fellow at the Caesar Rodney Institute of Delaware. You can email her at joanne-butler@comcast.net.